Team of scientists come up with method for long-term data storage

When we’re talking long periods of time, we’re often hard pressed to find a reliable storage medium where we can back up our data. This is usually because these units break down after a period of use. A new team composed mostly of grad students have come up with a solution for this problem. Story in the full article.

Those who us who work with a lot of gadgets know that digital storage can be unreliable after a long time of use – sometimes even after only a short time of use. This makes it really hard to be able to find reliable storage media to back up our data over a long period of time.

A new team – they don’t seem to have a collective name yet – are currently working on a solution for this problem. The team, comprised of two USCS graduate students and a researcher from NetApp, calls this solution Pergamum, after the ancient Greek library that stored fragile papyrus.

Pergamum is made up of customized hard drives to store data long-term, as opposed to today’s current backup system that uses tape libraries. Each hard drive in Pergamum is made up of a low-power processor, a flash memory card, and an ethernet port.

These hard drives are called “tomes” and they are basically minicomputers with very low power demands. When active, they can use only as little as 13 watts, and when they are inactive can shut down almost completely.

Each tome acts as a self-contained box with a network connection that uses flash memory as persistent storage so that operations are done without activating the hard drive. To protect from disk failures and errors (bet you were wondering about this one), Pergamum uses two levels of redundancy, writing data within and between disks.