Re: Finally long term stable high density storage

On Sun, 20 Oct 2024 08:48:16 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
360 TB
1+ B years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

The tech has been around... well, Wiki says it was first demonstrated
in '96. "Finally" is a bit of a misnomer. ;-)

IIRC, though, it has several downsides. Biggest is that it is
extremely slow with writes (and pretty slow with reads too). And even
if it had "HDD-speed" read/writes... well, back-of-the-napkin math
indicates it would still take close to 3 DAYS to read all that data
(about half that if it were SSD speed). We'd need advancement in the
IO first to really make use of drives that big.

It's also write-once, which limits its use to archival. So it's not
gonna replace HDDs or SDDs any time soon.

>
Now Spalls can fit all his games on one disk about the size of a quarter
and not worry it's going to die of bit rot.

I've over the years transferred pretty much all of my DOS-era games to
HDD (twice actually; first as images of the original medium, and then
a second time to a different HDD where the games are actually
installed). The installed games takes significantly less than a single
terabyte, and that collection includes probably every DOS game you've
ever heard of (and a few more too ;-)

Disk-space is so cheap and readily available already that -while I
wouldn't sneeze at a long-term archival medium- it's not really
necessary. It's surprisingly hard to fill up multi-terabyte sized
disks under ordinary usage ;-)