I love living in the future.

[theweaselking]

Southampton University has created working, practical memory diamond.

(Quartz, not diamond, TECHNICALLY, but: about 360 TB per disk the size of a quarter, stable for ~14 billion years at 190 degrees C, can survive temperatures of up to 1000 C)

Comments

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

This will be useful when the world ends—not with a bang, but with a whimper.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

And once we get them, they will be in a matter of seconds filled with porn.

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

What's the read/write speed like? Though this doesn't sound rewriteable ...

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

They don't say. So I suspect "sorta slow" and "write-once, read-many".

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

Excellent for archiving purposes

[falconwarrior.livejournal.com]

holy fuck, my last hard drive barely lasted 3 years and it was 1 TB

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Auspicious. Archive-grade cold storage binary media has been a problem since binary media was a thing.

Like any material making claims about longevity, there is no substitute for longitudinal testing. Remember how optical media was supposed to last twenty years? That said, it's encouraging just to see serious candidates for longitudinal testing.

[frith]

In ten years time half the data stored on the crystals will be unreadable due to changes in software with no back compatibility or support for abandonware.