just brew it! wrote:Furthermore, even if you could invent a solid state device with 100 year archival lifetime, what are you going to read it on? Whatever interface it uses will be decades out of date by then.
If I had a working USB 2.0 hard drive from the year 2000, I'd just connect it to any PC. It would most probably work. USB has stood the test of time better than most computer interfaces.
On the other hand, if I had a LTO-1 tape from the same year and needed to read data from it ... I wouldn't even know where to begin. Go scavenging for parts on eBay? Tape drives? If backwards compatibility is as bad as Wikipedia tells me then the most recent drives that could read it are LTO-3. They come with a SCSI interface. What variant and generation of SCSI is it? All I know is there are many. Interface cards? SCSI-to-PCI? Also, these drives were not plug-and-play, and the same goes for interface cards. What about drivers and application software? Where do I get them and can they run on Windows newer than Server 2003?
And it's been just a small fraction of a century.
I do see another issue with (imaginary) archival SSDs, though. Even if a tape or an optical disc begins to deteriorate after decades, most of the data can still be recovered as there's no single point of failure. A rotten SSD (or HDD) controller would make this task very much harder.