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Optical media have some disadvantages to conventional HDD and SSD though, unless they have reliable scratch and shatter protection.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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isn't that very much depending on the exact technology and material used?
Ok sure, but where's the advanced anti scratch device?
100 layers just means more data lost to a single scratch.
Put it in a case like an old floppy disc.
What of you put it on an enclosure that has the disk(potentially even more stacked on top of each other) plus all the hardware needed to read the disk. Then all you would need is to provide power and plug in a data cable.
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Listen, the idea isn't that you'll have a walkman that has every YouTube video you'll ever watch on it.
It's that you'd backup an entire fucking enterprise on one disc. Schedule it daily. Pay the support team to swap the disc out every night. Who needs infrastructure for ransomware, we got DISCS!
I suppose with that much data capacity they could halve the storage and add redundancy. My question is will it only have 1 reading head? That much data is going to take a very long time to read, unless they're doing multiple layers at a time,
With a rate 1/2 you can't expect to correct more than 5.5% of errors.
I am unfamiliar with the math used to calculate that value.
Would it not work like a parity RAID where each sector would have parity bits in a different location on the disc?
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This is great, I have a NAS and I still get slow data corruption for my long term data even using bit-rot resilient file systems. I would like a way to back up 5Tb of photos and videos on a single disc to bury somewhere for long term (decades) storage.
In the meantime, check out m-disc. You can put 100gb on one disc and it can last in storage for decades at a minimum.
Playing the long troll game by burying your nudes for some poor sap in the future to find.
I respect that.
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So optical drives will make a come back perhaps? Guess this means we'll have malware similar to in the early days where it would spontaneously open your CD-ROM drive "as a cupholder."
I used Computer Management in school and at work to pop open people's CD drives. I did a lot of dumb stuff.
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Do they last more than 20 years in ideal conditions?
Optical discs are already incredibly resistant and shouldn't be expected to fail in your lifetime. Most of the times they do, it's either old media (cd and dvd both had physical flaws in design), damage, or mistakes in manufacturing.
There's really no reason for the discs to degrade. It's just stamped plastic.
Pressed optical discs will last a very long time. The lifetime of burned discs depends on the type of dye that's used to store the data. Many of the early CD-R's would get corrupted after a few years, but that was solved a long time ago.
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As an optical media enthusiast, I’ve done a fair amount of research into how, why, and when discs fail. Because the discs use two or more polycarbonate layers pressed together, moisture can sometimes work its way between the layers and speed up degradation, especially if a disc has been overly flexed at the center. Heat and UV can also speed up degradation.
Another problem is that plastic is petroleum-based and it breaks down over time. A lot of people think that the reflective layer (the metal layer) is actually the data layer but it almost never is. The data layer itself is polycarbonate, sandwiched between the reflective layers and more polycarbonate layers.
The newer discs like blu-ray movies are made with better plastics that should last at least 100 years. Depending on the dye layer of writable and rewritable blu-rays, they should last either at least 25 years or 100 years.
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the researchers claim the petabit discs can last 50 to 100 years.
Anytime you get to that length, you always have to think about whether or not someone will have a drive to read it, a computer that it works on, and matching programs to decode the data. Think about some of the formats we had in the 70’s and 80’s and how often people actually have that hardware and software in working order now.
Think about some of the formats we had in the 70’s and 80’s and how often people actually have that hardware and software in working order now.
Well yea, but it's a matter of funding and business/government desire. 99% of the time the only people who care about accessing things that old are hobbyists and enthusiasts.
If something critical to a fortune 500 company or government was stored on it and they needed it they would have the means to contract out a specialty one off device just to read it (Or contract out to a very pricey data recovery shop)
And software is software, we can still run 70s and 80s software through a myriad of virtualization technologies fairly easily and cheaply.
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That's for future people to figure out
Aren’t most of those emulateable in dos-box or similar programs?
How do you emulate reading from a physical medium?
That’s the only hurdle if you have the software and decoding both of which are emulateable. Which wouldn’t be overly hard to reverse engineer a connector if you have everything else…
Assuming the software isn't lost, then yeah, typically it can be emulated or reverse engineered to work.
The bigger hurdle is the hardware, especially if the encoding of the data was proprietary, meaning that even if you could get a reading without it, you'd still need to figure out how to decode it into useful data
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