[duskwuff]

1) What on earth do they mean by "zero energy storage"? Magnetic tape doesn't consume energy at idle either. Hell, even hard disks can be powered down.

2) "Also, the optical-based new tech’s touted 50-year life is 10x the life of magnetic tape." Say what? Most magnetic tape is rated for up to 30 years in storage. You might only get a few years out of a tape if you're writing to it frequently... but this new format is write-once, so it's not even in the running.

3) People have made wild claims about holographic data storage being the Next Big Thing since the 1980s - in particular, there was a whole wave of them in the late 2000s claiming to have a DVD replacement under development. None of them have brought products to market. I'm not confident this one's going to be any different.

[JumpCrisscross]

Guess: magnetic memory exists in a high state of potential energy. This facilitates its degradation. While, say, scratches in stone are lower potential energy?

[duskwuff]

That's a clever theory, but the company specifically described it as having "zero energy storage costs".

[22c]

Does it mean that they can be stored at room temperature, in humid conditions, etc? ie. requiring no HVAC/dehumidifiers or whatever else might be needed to reliably store archive media?

That's my charitable interpretation.

[altairprime]

Magnetic tape depends on retained energy in the magnetic tape’s ferroparticles; burned-in polymer structures do not. Perhaps that’s what they meant?

[CoastalCoder]

> What on earth do they mean by "zero energy storage"?

My guess is that someone from marketing came up with that bullet point, and the company's actual engineers are torn between eye-rolling and wanting to get very violent on the marketing person.

[hammyhavoc]

Is `someone from marketing` an LLM?