Pacific Data Storage

Back in the 19somethings, geomagnetic surveys provided the first strong evidence for continental drift. The mid-oceanic sea-floor was found to have alternating stripes of north/south magnetisation, running parallel to deep-sea trenches.

These alternating stripes were caused by periodic reversals in the Earth's magnetic field, combined with the continual emergence of new volcanic rock spreading from the deep-see trenches. As new rock emerged, its iron-rich minerals took on the prevailing field direction before solidifying and the continuing to migrate outwards, with its magnetic field locked in place.

Maps of these patterns are beautiful, showing a series of alternating stripes (north/south polarity). I imagine that a close-up magnetometric view of a recording tape would look roughly similar.

But I digress.

We've now mapped out this field pattern pretty well, and all the data is stored away somewhere safe and sound. We no longer need the magnetic archive of the rocks themselves.

So, MaxCo Data and Livestock, Inc., is launching a scheme to re- use the magnetic storage capabilities of these deep-sea rocks. We have developed a rover capable of travelling slowly across the vast pointless expanses of the ocean floors. This rover (the MaxMag) is capable of generating magnetic pulses sufficiently strong to re- polarize the iron-containing elements even in long-solidified sea- floor rocks.

Due to the need for the field to penetrate through several metres of overlying silt before reaching reasonably solid and stable rock, we estimate that patches of ocean floor can be re-magnetized with a chosen polarity on a resolution of about 10 metres. This means that the Pacific sea-floor will have a storage capacity of about 1.5 Terabits, whilst the smaller Atlantic sea-floor can be used for checksums.

Although this storage capacity is not huge compared to modern hard drives, it is very secure against fire and flood. Data written in this way should endure for millions, if not billions of years. Companies and governments needing the ultimate in secure, disaster-proof data-storage are queueing up to avail themselves of this facility.

For an additional charge, MaxCo will perform regular data- checking and servicing on a millennial cycle. Data which is approaching subduction zones will be read, and re-encoded in the freshly- produced sea-floor rocks alongside mid-ocean trenches.

For short-term storage, special rates are available for regions around Hawaii, Iceland and so forth, where data can be guaranteed stable only for a few millennia.

Data read-out is, of course, a concern. Current read-out rates are approximately 0.01 bits per second, using a sensitive magnetometer mounted on the MaxMag rover itself. However, we are now developing a fleet of eight nimble reading-only-rovers, and expect to attain readout rates of over 2 bytes per minute in the near future. However, access times will be dependent on the location of your data, and on seasonal factors.