lol maybe they’ll give it up and eventually China will do it with state funding 🤣

Adding to my other comment, as far as archival “replacing drives every few years.” Nah. A HDD can last a decade or more. New HDDs are tanks. If you take it and store in unpowered, the only think that will take it out is the eventual corrosion from the air which will take a long ass time. Vacuum seal it and it’ll last even longer.

SSDs however, pretty much have a predetermined lifespan and any cell on it can only be rewritten a specific number of times before it dies. This is why doing stuff like a full format, an old school defrag or like, certain disk check functions on an SSD, is very bad for it. It’s also one hypothesis as to why Windows 11 seems to be randomly killing SSDs. If something in the system is making it do a bunch of formats and disk checks on the SSD, it will burn it out.

Also SSDs will lose data if not plugged in for a long time. The actual need a small amount of current occasionally to hold the data. Idk how often, or how long before it can lose a ton of data, but they are not like HDDs in that you can’t just shuck them away forever.

We are getting so small that it’s literally just physics. That’s a big deal with almost all of it now. Quantum tunnelling and stuff. I don’t fully understand it but have ready about it here and there. Like we are getting so small that they only factor is that physics doesn’t allow it anymore. Like the distance between atoms and such. How electrons can jump gaps and all their weird stuff.

Like, for instance, you know how processor makes will have levels of the same type? Like a new release of AMD Ryzen 3, 5, 7, 9, but all come out from the same model? They don’t make those differently. They don’t set out to make x number of 3s, y number of 5s etc. They start out all using the same templates, and how many errors there are in the process, is what defines the level. A 7 has fewer errors then a 5, for example. This is how it was explained to me anyway. So right now, with all this stuff, it’s literally just reaching a sort of physical limitations of what’s possible.

I think currently the problem is that you have to constantly replace devices, and that also means you have to remember to do it too.

Exactly, the idea of media that basically lasts forever is really useful in my opinion. We currently don’t have anything that would last as long as regular paper. Most of the information we have is stored on volatile media. Using something like this to permanently record accumulated knowledge like scientific papers, technology blueprints, and so on, would be a very good idea in my opinion.