Glass Is The Future of Data Storage

[sman]

Glass Is The Future of Data Storage

https://youtu.be/n_xvUoHm9Ho

'Five-dimensional' glass discs can store data for up to 13.8 billion years

"https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/16/11018018/5d-data-storage-glass"

Photographs fade, books rot, and even hard drives eventually fester. When you take the long view, preserving humanity's collective culture isn't a marathon, it's a relay — with successive generations passing on information from one slowly-failing storage medium to the next. However, this could change. Scientists from the University of Southampton in the UK have created a new data format that encodes information in tiny nanostructures in glass. A standard-sized disc can store around 360 terabytes of data, with an estimated lifespan of up to 13.8 billion years even at temperatures of 190°C. That's as old as the Universe, and more than three times the age of the Earth.

[exile360]

Yep, I saw this.  It looks like it could be a robust solution for long term data storage, though I'm guessing that by the time the technology is refined they will likely come up with even more robust materials and methods to use, but either way it looks promising.

[David H. Lipman]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_memory

"Phase-change memory (also known as PCM, PCME, PRAM, PCRAM, OUM (ovonic unified memory) and C-RAM or CRAM (chalcogenide RAM) is a type of non-volatile random-access memory. PRAMs exploit the unique behaviour of chalcogenide glass. In the older generation of PCM, heat produced by the passage of an electric current through a heating element generally made of TiN was used to either quickly heat and quench the glass, making it amorphous, or to hold it in its crystallization temperature range for some time, thereby switching it to a crystalline state. PCM also has the ability to achieve a number of distinct intermediary states, thereby having the ability to hold multiple bits in a single cell, but the difficulties in programming cells in this way has prevented these capabilities from being implemented in other technologies (most notably flash memory) with the same capability.

Newer PCM technology has been trending in two different directions. One group has been directing a lot of research towards attempting to find viable material alternatives to Ge₂Sb₂Te₅ (GST), with mixed success. Another group has developed the use of a GeTe–Sb₂Te₃superlattice to achieve non-thermal phase changes by simply changing the co-ordination state of the Germanium atoms with a laser pulse. This new Interfacial Phase-Change Memory (IPCM) has had many successes and continues to be the site of much active research.^[1]

Leon Chua has argued that all two-terminal non-volatile-memory devices, including PCM, should be considered memristors.^[2]Stan Williams of HP Labs has also argued that PCM should be considered a memristor.^[3] However, this terminology has been challenged and the potential applicability of memristor theory to any physically realizable device is open to question.^[4][5]"

 

References:

• Glass ceramic approaches for energy storage materials
• Chalcogenide phase-change memory materials for high-speed, low-power data storage

 

 

Edited November 18, 2019 by David H. Lipman

[sman]

So, not only permanent storage, but for main memory applications too Glass based solutions is being explored.. Gr8. Tks David..

[David H. Lipman]

In my reply, the two References cited had their URLs burred into one URL ( thanks to this Forum editor ).  This has been fixed.  There are now two distinct URLs cited in the References.

Edited November 18, 2019 by David H. Lipman

[sman]

Yes, I was also puzzled by that, will check them again now..

 

[pondus]

GitHub: We're storing your open-source code in the frozen Arctic for 1,000 years

GitHub will take a snapshot of all public code repositories, save it on film, and archive it in an old Norwegian mine.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-were-storing-your-open-source-code-in-the-frozen-arctic-for-1000-years/

https://github.com/datproject/svalbard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIKrG3-WpAk

[sman]

Quite an effort but doomsday intensity, reality one can't predict, but still something is better than nothing..