News Company makes stone-like optical discs that last forever

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/08/11/stone-like-optical-discs-will-be-free-from/1

Millenniata and Hitachi-LG Data Storage are working on a new type of optical disk they claim lasts forever.

 

Will the DVD/CD driver just die..Its so slow.

 

They'd better make a player from the same stuff then so there's a way to access them. I was in the school year that did the BBC Doomsday project that was rather short-sightedly put onto laserdisc!

 

Optical media is pretty much irrelevant to me, my DVD drive isn't even plugged in!

 

I havn't used optical media for ages either at home. Last time I used it was probably to install windows 7. All my games are digital download via steam mostly.

 

I remember as a child in 1982 I was one of the visitors with my father at the Firato introduction of the Compact Disc presentation by Philips. I was around 10 years old. We manage to get into the private presentation booth, the CD was made of a whole different material then what we know now, it was in fact, a lot more robust then the flimsy plastic it is made of now. As demonstrated by the presenter jumping up and down on the disc that was laying on the ground. And put into the CD player afterwards. While the presenter was saying that this was the 7th presentation where he was abusing the CD this way.

I also remember one of the later Firato's, I believe 1988 where Philips presented the First plasma screen. It truly was a Wow factor and my father wanted to buy one but after the presenter mentioned the price, around 60.000 guldens (30.000 euro), my father said 'well it was a try...' The plasma screen was accompanied by a big black box (the size of modern high-end amplifiers) that houses all the electronics to power the plasma screen behind the wall.

Remembering the enthusiastic response from my father in 88, I bought a 42" plasma screen in 2002 and delivered to my parents house as a present for my father. It still is in use today.

 

Laserdisc - I remember Dixons stocking those... the players were enormous. Interested to know what people use for long term backup if they're not using CD/DVD's. I use hard drives, and copy all the data to new drives about once every 2 years or so. With HDD getting cheaper per terabyte and the speed of copying data compared to DVD it works for me.

 

I remember the demos on Tomorrow World where they put the CD in a pot of Jam or something, removed it, washed it and all was rosey - what came to market certainly wasn't that robust, so the proof of concept would have to have something over the conventional CD. After all, does it work on a standard CD/DVD player etc?

As for whether it's useful, that depends on the data density and write speed for my money. Times have moved on since the optical disc was the medium of choice, and so have requirements - we are now at the the point where there is no way to put all your data onto a single portable media - EXCEPT via a hard drive or an enterprise marketed solution such as a tape drive. Storage and portable storage has been lagging advances significantly. Look at the USB drive,and the price of high density/capacity units....

 

Logo on disc looks like that of the sega dreamcast

 

@ Tattysnuc: The data density is the same as a standard single layer DVD, ie about 4.7 Gb. There is an FAQ document here: primera.eu/millenniata/FAQ-100416-EN.pdf And while it cannot be written by a standard writer, it *can* be read by a standard reader.

It's all well and good saying "just copy your data to new media every 2 years", but there are a lot of people out there, myself included, who are not necessarily diligent enough to do so, or don't have the money to regularly invest in new equipment.

I am very interested in any storage medium which is likely to still be robust enough to survive if I leave it face - up in the sun, leave a magnet on top of it or forget about it in a cupboard for 10 years. Hard drives get wiped by magnets, or can seize up if left on a shelf unused for years, home - written CDs / DVDs degrade over time and are wiped by sunlight. It is a nice thought that the "last resort" backup provided by such technology should be robust enough to be trustworthy should every other copy fail.

 

Maybe as mass backup/storage for huge amounts of data as an alternative to tapes, but otherwise, in the consumer market, the CD is becoming near obselete, with digital downloads and blu-ray becoming the norm. Maybe if this technology had been a few years earlier...

 

But will it blend?

 

Forever, but what if it doesn't, will I be able to take it back?

 

And (as others have said) we've heard all this before. CDs were supposed to last "forever". They don't wear like tapes and vinyl bet I'll bet you will still find old vinyl records that could be played long after your CDs degrade. - for that matter I hear that there are still old wax cylinders out there that can be played. Additionally, anything that replaces, or aims to replace, CDs & DVDs needs higher capacity.

 

I know some people are uncomfortable with this idea, but I think that backing up to cloud storage is the way to go. I don't have much use for physical media these days, and 4.7gb capacity is too small to bother with imo.

 

I have DVDs from over 10 years ago that still work just as well as when I bought them, mainly because they aren't scratched up. So should I expect those DVDs to turn to sand in the next 10 years or so?

Yeah, Im not buying that pile of B.S. in case there was any doubt.

 

That depends, actually - Primarily on the type of optical disc. The claims in the article about degradation align with everything I've been told about writable disc media before.
Optical Discs pressed from a glass master (ie; movies, games, music albums, etc.) last for ages.
Some writable Optical Discs have a relatively short shelf-life due to the fact that a lot of CD-Rs use a laser-activated dye layer in the disc instead of physical pits in the disc surface as their storage method; and that dye degrades over time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R#Expected_lifespan

This!
I've always hated optical drives & media. Having to carefully handle optical discs always felt like such a pain after years of using floppy disks. I'd prefer if CDs and DVDs had MiniDisc-like plastic casing around them to make them more robust, but that would've made the media far more expensive.

 

No, this!

I always thought MD would be a good idea for computer backups. Of course, nowadays you'd have to increase the capacity significantly for me to care. Moot point, though, it isn't coming back, and it was owned by Sony, so I wouldn't buy it if it did.

 

Good to know someone is taking on a better alternative to the cd/dvd issue. At the current rate photolabs are pumping out discs with the claim of 'archive cd/dvd' there will be a huge influx of people with rotting discs that didnt know any better. This also reminds me of the true gold cd-r's. They used a gold layer rather than a dye, but they were still made on polycarb. I like the idea, but it needs more proof of its genuine reliability. And not some BS stage show, but real examples and numbers to back it.

 

wait... modern CD/DVDs will last about 15 - 20. Blu-ray Discs last like 25.