Western Digital Invests in Ceramic Storage Firm That Claims 5,000-Year Data Retention (tomshardware.com)
- Reference: 0177466591
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/05/12/1519209/western-digital-invests-in-ceramic-storage-firm-that-claims-5000-year-data-retention
- Source link: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/western-digital-is-investing-in-ceramic-hard-drive-pioneer-cerabyte-companys-nearly-indestructible-storage-device-gets-a-key-backer
Cerabyte recently demonstrated its technology's resilience by boiling storage devices in salt water and subjecting them to oven-level heat. The company states its ceramic storage withstands fire, moisture, UV light, radiation, corrosion, and EMP bursts. Beyond durability, Cerabyte aims to enable massive capacity increases as the industry moves toward what it calls the "Yottabyte era," while targeting storage costs below $1 per TB by 2030.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/western-digital-is-investing-in-ceramic-hard-drive-pioneer-cerabyte-companys-nearly-indestructible-storage-device-gets-a-key-backer
So many other things.... (Score:2)
So many other things external to the durability of the media have to go right for that data to read or want to be read that far in the future. It's difficult to tell whether technological society will have collapsed or just evolved to a point where all this is meaningless. In either case it may not be very useful. With a collapse, you have to bounce back to a recovery by that point. There is a minute chance that someone could discover the media an archeological style dig AND be able to read it with wh
Re: (Score:2)
It's not impossible. There are 5000 year old Sumerian cuneiform writings which are legible and we *can* read them.
Don't go in the kitchen, I dropped a million books (Score:2)
It may well be immune to heat, cold, and, uh, salt, but the company's website says that the substrate is glass, and obviously there are lots of things that glass is not immune to. For one, we must hope that no bulls get loose in the library over the next 5000 years.
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> It may well be immune to heat, cold, and, uh, salt, but the company's website says that the substrate is glass, and obviously there are lots of things that glass is not immune to. For one, we must hope that no bulls get loose in the library over the next 5000 years.
DVDs were expected to last 100 years; however some of my collection is less than 20 years old and is unreadable. I'm taking that 5000 years with a very large grain of salt.
Yet another clay/glass storage medium (Score:3)
Clay writings have been around for 5000 years, and absent breaking the clay tablets, the information on the clay media should last forever. For both clay and glass, the real issues for permanence are the permanence of the writer/reader, the performance and convenience of the writing and reading process, and economic viability.
More info (Score:2)
Wondering WTF this tech is? Whitepaper: [1]https://www.cerabyte.com/wp-co... [cerabyte.com]
What a world we live in when the news for nerds is about the money instead of the tech.
[1] https://www.cerabyte.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Cerabyte-White-Paper-2-25.pdf
+R or -R? (Score:2)
Back in the days of the DVD-ROM, we needed long storage for medical study data (I think 15 years was required by law). The DVD could hold a lot of data, but while the medium was great, the formats on that medium were so undetermined that it was totally useless for long term storage. Just think that you would have picked +R while a year later the world would have settled on -R.
Hardware is nice, but as long as software formats and planned obsolescence are a thing, it is useless.
Pole reversal? (Score:2)
Knowing this tech exists and is being commercialized right now doesn't give one more piece of mind. Quite the opposite when it comes at a time people are concerned the elites are preparing for a cataclysmic event like pole reversal or worse. Yikes
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> ... preparing for a cataclysmic event like pole reversal ...
The last pole reversal was 41,000 years ago. We obviously survived. They are more slow-motion events than any thing else.