…but this new memory technology Neatorama’s talking about will be here to stay:
Berkeley… researcher Alex Zettl and colleagues created a physical memory cell composed of an iron nanoparticle that can be moved back and forth in a nanotube. The position of the iron particle represents the state of the bit, which leads to very dense and highly stabile memory arrays, resulting in very long lifetime.
How stable is stable? Here’s a chart that shows typical storage lifetimes vs bit density for a variety of storage media. As you can see, his stuff beats rock!
Go to the page to see the chart. You can read more on that new superdisk here (where they have a picture with the glorious caption, “Egyptian hieroglyphs, a low-density, long-lifetime storage medium”).