this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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I wonder what the longevity of one of these discs is? The article says they can be manufactured in regular DVD production facilities, so it probably depends on the material used (which I think can range).
If they could combine something close to this data capacity level with the M-DISC standard (which supposedly last for about 1,000 years once you take into account the organic ingredients) that would be fantastic.
There's no point making it last 1000 years since there won't be any working drives by then. You usually need to move data to a newer format every 15-30 years. Look how hard it is to recover data from 8" floppy disks or old tape formats now.
Tape storage 100% is still a thing and is valued for a lot of truly critical data.
Also, WAY too much critical infrastructure still depends on floppy drives because... there is not a good reason to upgrade the hardware when they need data on the order of hundreds of kilobytes every couple of months.
Storage with purpose will be preserved. Maybe not in a computer sold in best buy but very much in "computing" as a whole.
I can't think of any situation where THIS disc is useful. But optical drives themselves are 100% going to remain a thing because they provide write once data storage (and OS installation) which is incredibly useful in secure environments.
Tape is still very popular. There has been a new LTO version released every few years. The recent ones are only backwards compatible with the previous version and the older ones supported 2 previous generations. If you need to read 20 year old data from an LTO tape, you will have to find an old drive that's compatible with that version.
There is a surprising amount of equipment still reliant on 3.5" floppy disks. Unfortunately it's getting much harder to find new old stock disks. Many of the older disks are degrading now. I've had some where a lot of the magnetic material gets worn off after a single read. At least there are floppy drive emulators now that can be used to prolong the life of older equipment as long as it doesn't use a weird format or interface.
This 1000 years thing is how (at least on paper) the main components of the medium can chemically stay intact and bonded together. You want this as stable as possible since more stability means more resistance to outside forces like moisture and such. Most discs suffering from disc rot today had a number between 5 years (baaaaad) and 200 years (still not great) and are decaying now.
So don't take things like this too literally.