"Eternal flash drive": how to create a reliable media that will save data for thousands of years
The service life of compact discs, SSD and HDDs does not exceed 10-20 years. At the same time, the global data volume is growing by 40% every year, which stimulates the demand for drives, but the durability of the media leaves much to be desired. Most HDDs stop working for several years: as a rule, this is due to the breakdown of moving parts. Compact discs have been stored for decades, but increasing temperatures, humidity, or mechanical damage make access to information difficult: the surface of the disc is peeling off and easily scratched. SSD, advertised today as a "non-killing" carrier, live only a few years, and have a fixed number of rewriting cycles: the electric charge circulating inside sooner or later fades away even in the absence of active access to the content. At the same time, the value of the lost information can be very high: for example, it can be large volumes of technical documentation or historical archives that cannot be recovered.
www.ohmygeek.net
Long data storage is a problem in which the laws of thermodynamics work against the interests of the person. Carriers fail, require the cost of maintaining optimal environmental conditions and lose cumulative properties. Regular SSD replacement costs servers $ 0.5 per 1 GB, HDD replacement costs $ 0.1 per 1 GB. According to Cisco, by 2020, the cumulative amount of information stored in data centers will reach 6.6 zettabytes, which means $ 495 billion a year in the industry's cost of replacing storage media. It is assumed that the development of "eternal" carriers will save the data industry trillions of dollars a year.
To date, physicists have proposed several possible solutions to this problem: for example, a team of American scientists recorded information in diamond voids replaced by nitrogen atoms, and Russian scientists from the Quartz project of the Advanced Study Foundation (FPI) suggested storing data on quartz disks. The life span of the data in both cases exceeds the CD lifetime by orders of magnitude. However, can the problem be considered solved?
')
In 2016, scientists from the University of New York recorded information in diamonds using fluorescence. The researchers changed the emission spectrum of NV diamond centers (diamond crystal lattice defects that occur when a carbon atom is removed and a nitrogen atom is added to its place) with a laser beam. The laser locally changes the charge of NV-centers from negative to zero, which entails a change in the color of the surface of the diamond during laser scanning of low power. Scientists have found several levels of fluorescence distinguishable by laser scanning, which increases the recording density, and the absence of structural changes removes restrictions on rewriting. The disadvantages of this technology are the high cost of diamonds and pseudo media. Reading blurs the picture of light and dark areas, because of what the data have to overwrite again and again.
The Advanced Research Foundation (FPI) funds the development of quartz carriers with a virtually unlimited service life and up to 1 TB: this is enough, for example, to record a large part of the archives of the State Film Fund of Russia.
Scientists from RHTU them. DI. Mendeleev, working under the project of FPI , suggested applying laser information not to the surface, but to the volume of the quartz disk by nano-gratings - in this way not one, but up to five data bits are recorded at one point. The quartz disks created to date as part of the project contain 25 GB of information and survive at a temperature of about 1000 followed by thermal shock — they retain data after a fire with the extinguishing system activated without using cloud storages. It is enough to wipe the soot off the discs - and they are ready to work again. For comparison, disks of similar capacity of the Millenniata company with a declared life of 1000 years, made of polycarbonate, are destroyed at a temperature of 130. Unlike American technology, quartz disks are an eternal carrier in a more strict sense of the word: the lifetime of a quartz carrier can be measured for thousands of years.
Why are quartz discs and “eternal flash drives” still not on the market? The widespread use of quartz disks as durable storage media is hampered by three problems, which scientists and developers are working to solve in the projects of the Advanced Research Foundation: the high cost of recording, the need to develop reading technology from scratch, bulkiness and equipment instability. These barriers stand between successful experimental recording of data into a diamond or quartz and the ability to “drive” exotic media after 100 reading cycles per day in the archive center of some city library: before technology goes into production, scientists must create stable recording and reading devices of acceptable size, reduce the cost of writing and modify the technology of reading.
Petr Henkin, Project Manager of the Information Research Directorate of the Advanced Research Foundation, comments on:
The process of making a quartz disc. Photo: Advanced Research Foundation.
As an illustration, we give a relatively recent example. In February 2016, employees of the University of Southampton recorded the Bible on a quartz disk and presented it to the UN Secretary General. However, these data can be read only in the laboratory in which this disk was created, under a microscope. The British read these data using a polarizing microscope - they take a picture, send it to a computer, read the data, then take the next shot. The speed of this process is several bytes per second.
In addition to the difficulties described, the physics of a quartz disk imposes restrictions on the cost of recording. Quartz is resistant to high temperatures, so high energy is needed for recording. Today, the data is recorded using a femtosecond laser, which costs millions of rubles, so even when the technology becomes stable and convenient, only large data centers and government structures can afford to record on quartz disks at first.
The future of FPI technology can be imagined in the format of B2B recording and reading centers, where people can come with their carriers and copy data from HDD / SSD to optical quartz disks, or B2G archives of libraries and medical institutions. Maybe someday these technologies will be used in the same way as today - “flash drives” and “external hard drives”: you can remember that the first CD drives cost a lot, but over time the cost has decreased, the size has decreased, and For more than twenty years, we have received modern compact devices.
www.ohmygeek.net
Keep long and inexpensive
Long data storage is a problem in which the laws of thermodynamics work against the interests of the person. Carriers fail, require the cost of maintaining optimal environmental conditions and lose cumulative properties. Regular SSD replacement costs servers $ 0.5 per 1 GB, HDD replacement costs $ 0.1 per 1 GB. According to Cisco, by 2020, the cumulative amount of information stored in data centers will reach 6.6 zettabytes, which means $ 495 billion a year in the industry's cost of replacing storage media. It is assumed that the development of "eternal" carriers will save the data industry trillions of dollars a year.
To date, physicists have proposed several possible solutions to this problem: for example, a team of American scientists recorded information in diamond voids replaced by nitrogen atoms, and Russian scientists from the Quartz project of the Advanced Study Foundation (FPI) suggested storing data on quartz disks. The life span of the data in both cases exceeds the CD lifetime by orders of magnitude. However, can the problem be considered solved?
')
In 2016, scientists from the University of New York recorded information in diamonds using fluorescence. The researchers changed the emission spectrum of NV diamond centers (diamond crystal lattice defects that occur when a carbon atom is removed and a nitrogen atom is added to its place) with a laser beam. The laser locally changes the charge of NV-centers from negative to zero, which entails a change in the color of the surface of the diamond during laser scanning of low power. Scientists have found several levels of fluorescence distinguishable by laser scanning, which increases the recording density, and the absence of structural changes removes restrictions on rewriting. The disadvantages of this technology are the high cost of diamonds and pseudo media. Reading blurs the picture of light and dark areas, because of what the data have to overwrite again and again.
Eternal data on quartz carriers
The Advanced Research Foundation (FPI) funds the development of quartz carriers with a virtually unlimited service life and up to 1 TB: this is enough, for example, to record a large part of the archives of the State Film Fund of Russia.
Scientists from RHTU them. DI. Mendeleev, working under the project of FPI , suggested applying laser information not to the surface, but to the volume of the quartz disk by nano-gratings - in this way not one, but up to five data bits are recorded at one point. The quartz disks created to date as part of the project contain 25 GB of information and survive at a temperature of about 1000 followed by thermal shock — they retain data after a fire with the extinguishing system activated without using cloud storages. It is enough to wipe the soot off the discs - and they are ready to work again. For comparison, disks of similar capacity of the Millenniata company with a declared life of 1000 years, made of polycarbonate, are destroyed at a temperature of 130. Unlike American technology, quartz disks are an eternal carrier in a more strict sense of the word: the lifetime of a quartz carrier can be measured for thousands of years.
Why are quartz discs and “eternal flash drives” still not on the market? The widespread use of quartz disks as durable storage media is hampered by three problems, which scientists and developers are working to solve in the projects of the Advanced Research Foundation: the high cost of recording, the need to develop reading technology from scratch, bulkiness and equipment instability. These barriers stand between successful experimental recording of data into a diamond or quartz and the ability to “drive” exotic media after 100 reading cycles per day in the archive center of some city library: before technology goes into production, scientists must create stable recording and reading devices of acceptable size, reduce the cost of writing and modify the technology of reading.
Petr Henkin, Project Manager of the Information Research Directorate of the Advanced Research Foundation, comments on:
“Industrial technology is very different from the experimental technology, which showed successful results on the laboratory table. It should have an acceptable stability in time and be reproducible: the user should not twist the device and make efforts to make it work. Today, recording information on a quartz disk is already happening without human intervention, and we can record a full disk in a day, but when recording goes in the flow and time is limited to hours, predictable difficulties arise - the equipment overheats, it works with deviations. The novelty of the technology also creates problems when reading data: a device for reading information from a quartz disk is created completely from scratch, and this postpones the development of the development from the laboratory. ”
The process of making a quartz disc. Photo: Advanced Research Foundation.
As an illustration, we give a relatively recent example. In February 2016, employees of the University of Southampton recorded the Bible on a quartz disk and presented it to the UN Secretary General. However, these data can be read only in the laboratory in which this disk was created, under a microscope. The British read these data using a polarizing microscope - they take a picture, send it to a computer, read the data, then take the next shot. The speed of this process is several bytes per second.
In addition to the difficulties described, the physics of a quartz disk imposes restrictions on the cost of recording. Quartz is resistant to high temperatures, so high energy is needed for recording. Today, the data is recorded using a femtosecond laser, which costs millions of rubles, so even when the technology becomes stable and convenient, only large data centers and government structures can afford to record on quartz disks at first.
The future of FPI technology can be imagined in the format of B2B recording and reading centers, where people can come with their carriers and copy data from HDD / SSD to optical quartz disks, or B2G archives of libraries and medical institutions. Maybe someday these technologies will be used in the same way as today - “flash drives” and “external hard drives”: you can remember that the first CD drives cost a lot, but over time the cost has decreased, the size has decreased, and For more than twenty years, we have received modern compact devices.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/315886/
All Articles