Despite the widespread belief upon their introduction to the market in the early 1980s that CDs would safely store data encoded on them forever, CDs and DVDs are actually susceptible to damage from both normal use and environmental exposure and have an average lifespan of under 10 years. A new optical disc company based in Salt Lake City called Millenniata is set to deliver a new type of optical disc that can be read on standard DVD drives but will safely store data for up to 1,000 years.
The new disc, called M-DISC, stores data in the same way as CDs and DVDs - as a series of pits - but instead of the pits being burned into organic dyes using a laser as is the case with traditional optical discs, the pits are literally etched into a layer of a "rock-like material" composed of inorganic materials and compounds including metals and metalloids using a higher powered laser. The resultant pits aren't affected by temperature, humidity or sunlight. Millenniata says it expects this layer would actually remain readable for over 10,000 years, however, the polycarbonate layers it is sandwiched between are the weak links and would only be reliable for at least 1,000 years.
An accelerated life test performed by the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division tested the M-DISC against five brands of conventional archival discs currently on the market and found that the M-Disc suffered no degradation or data loss, while all the other discs failed. The data stored on an M-DISC will even survive being dipped into a vat of liquid nitrogen at -180°C (-292°F) before being transferred to a container of near boiling water - handy if that's how you treat your DVDs.
M-DISCs are a write-once technology designed as a cheap permanent backup solution that is still backwards compatible with existing DVD drives, including consumer DVD players. Millenniata says its M-DISCs offer comparable performance to standard DVDs and provide the same 4.7 GB storage capacity as a single-sided, single-layer DVD. The company says it is also currently working on a Blu-Ray version of the M-DISC to provide greater storage capacity.
Millenniata has partnered with Hitachi-LG Data Storage, Inc, which will manufacture M-READY DVD drives and sell them under its DVD brands. There's no word on what these devices will sell for, but the M-DISCs will be priced at US$2.99 for a single disc, $13.89 for a pack of five, and $26.59 for a pack of ten when they go on sale through the Millenniata website next month.
Great, we\'ve come full circle after a few thousand years of writing and are back to chiseling things onto rocks. :-)
The only only permanent archival media for data and for images are still paper and B&W film.
Sure - that\'s 900- years less than these, but really, you\'ll have been dead for half a century before anyone notices the difference, and the probability that something else will have claimed your disk before time does is pretty high anyway (fire/theft/flood/war/argument/stupidity/forgetfulness) - that\'s assuming anything would exist in 100 years (let along 1000 years) that would still read these things anyhow. Try finding an 8\" floppy drive today (and the software to read what was on it, and more software to use whatever format it was in), for example - and that was only 30 years ago.
Surely SD cards will take the place of DVDs. They are becoming cheaper all the time and the capacity is increasing. Question: Could you use SD card instead of a Blu-ray disc(& player)?
Worst case scenario civilization collapses (it may not look close to collapsing and it isn\'t, but who is to say we won\'t be at nuclear war 500 years from now eh? think long term and plan for the worst just in case, total environmental collapse in 500 years is certainly believable). But maybe the descendants of the survivors find the monument and we make it easy enough to use that they\'re able to rebuild civilization from that stored knowledge. (Or maybe they\'d think the monument was possessed by demons, the discs evil, and they\'d sacrifice a few people to appease the gods before burning it down)
If it works our history wont be lost either. It would have immense value to future archeologists even if civilization didn\'t collapse. At the very least it\'s an incredibly neat and informative time capsule for future humans to ponder.
They say that one layer of the disc, the one with the information would last 10,000 years. But to make it playable even in a non-standard specially made player like that may be impossible at the moment, especially with a player made to last 10,000 years.
But anyways, I think some group of humans should be making it a priority to store knowledge in a permanent means for future generations. A bit of a plan b. Always good to have a plan b.
Probably by then someone will build a similar type of machine or device and make millions. Don't know yet what is the equivalance of $million, 1,000 years from now. 1K plus people arround the world has already made their billions now.
Unless they make the reading device which will stay intact and funcational 1k years.
Should be interesting....