The Forever Disk

Interesting product possibilities from Millenniata (http://www.millenniata.com/). They claim to have an optical disk (a DVD) that will last 1000 years and is backwards compatible with existing DVD readers. You need a new drive to create the disks, but you can use your existing drives to read them.

So… what happens when I no longer have a DVD drive? I guarantee you that I won’t in 100 years – after the Singularity :-)

September 9th, 2008 in Misc, technology

2 Comments

AnonymousSeptember 10th, 2008 at 5:22 AM

Wow, I think that a DVD that lasts for 1000 years is incredible, and it really doesn’t matter if it lasts 1000 or 100 years, anything is better than the current shelf life of 5-7 years that our current DVD’s hold. This could save companies millions of dollars in copying archives annually.

Steve BennettSeptember 10th, 2008 at 7:46 AM

I agree that anything is better than the junk media that most mainstream retailers sell. For moderate life expectations, there are already various “gold” disks available from Delkin, MAM-A, Kodak, etc.

I agree that it might not matter if a disk lasts 100 or 1000 years, if you could rely on it to actually last that long. The problem is that these lifetime figures are statistical averages… your milage may vary. Hence the higher the quoted “average” life, the less likely you will be to experience a failure on an individual disk.

This might make the 1000 year disk more interesting than a 100 year disk, even if the statistical improvements in probabilities for the disk lasting 50 years improve only marginally. I haven’t seen any studies on the expected lifetimes of any of these disks – hence I don’t know what the failure rate curves look like to evaluate the probability of failure in the “early” years (i.e., 1-50). If the 1000 year disk improves my odds of getting a good disk 50 years from now (and the probability is high enough) then this is compelling.