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Storage: Save your pictures of the family into the next millenium
Researchers from UCSC say they’ve found a way to cheaply and reliably store data on standard hard drives for an estimated 1400 years. Data saved on tape today can be expected to last for 10 to 30 years, and data stored on optical may last for even 50 years, but as more data gets archived electronically, the worry is that unless properly managed, the countless photos, videos and documents that are so easy to create today won’t survive a complete lifetime.
The UCSC system is called Pergamum, named after a Greek library that made the transition from the use of papyrus to parchment. Their system combines standard disks with NAND Flash memory (on-volatile random access memory — NVRAM). The data is intended for long-term and infrequent access archival. The NVRAM contains a signature of the data of the disk along with filenames and associated metadata. The standard disk will be powered off until someone needs to retrieve the actual data.
Searches against filenames and metadata that do not actually yield items that are to be retrieved don’t require the standard disks to power on. In addition, data is stored with intra-disk and inter-disk redundancy to prevent data loss. If some of the redundant data is found to have been lost because of failure, the data is rebuilt.
The NVRAM consumes very little power and the design significantly reduces the wear on the hard drives. With this design, the main point of failure turns out to be the NVRAM. Performance and reliability calculations were made of a 10 PB system consisting of 1 TB hard drives structured with three inter-disk parity segments per 16-disk reliability group and 3 intra-disk parity blocks per segment. Their calculation is that the system has reliability of 1.25×107 hours, or about 1400 years.
It’s an interesting long-term storage idea but unlikely that today’s disk and access technology would be at all relevant or useable 1400 years from now.
