DailyDirt: The Future Of Storage

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Storing digital data can be unreliable if you want it to last a really long time. But there are many ways to store vast amounts of data, and if you're not in a hurry to retrieve the data, it can be somewhat cheap to maintain an enormous amount of information nowadays. Here are just a few examples of storing LOTS of data in somewhat unconventional ways.

• Printing at about 100,000 dots per inch in full color has been achieved by researchers at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore. As a proof of principle, a test image of Lenna was formed on a silicon wafer covered with a nanoscale metal coating. [url]
• Amazon is starting to offer archival storage for just $0.01 per gigabyte per month. This Glacier storage service is aimed at replacing old tape archives and geographically distinct facilities, but retrieving the data isn't so convenient: data retrieval requests can take hours (hence the name Glacier) and there's also a retrieval fee after you've accessed more than 5% of your data vault in a month. [url]
• Geneticists in Boston have stored a 5.27-megabit book (containing 53,246 words, 11 JPG image files and a JavaScript program) on DNA. This is the highest density of non-biological data ever encoded by DNA, and a gram of material could store 455 exabytes of data. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: archive, data, dna, exabyte, gigabyte, nanoscale, printing, storage
Companies: amazon