The Persistence of Data

I recently came across this post on how long data will last here at Seagate’s blog:

“In the past, I posted about the shelf-life of each storage medium, granted it’s not forever, but 100 years is pretty good. A lot better than disk drives and tape.

Floppy disks: up to 5 years

Hard Drives: up to 10 years

Magnetic tape: up to 20 years

Optical disks: up to 100 yrs

SSD and Flash: up to 100 yrs

Stone tablets: up to 10,000 yrs”

I found it particularly interesting because he references a redOrbit article on optical data storage technology pioneered in Prof. Ken Singer’s lab in CLiPS.