Video of ceramic storage system prototype surfaces online — 10,000TB cartridges bombarded with laser rays could become mainstream by 2030, making slow hard drives and tapes obsolete::Ceramics-based storage medium consumes very little energy and lasts more than 5,000 years, creators say
My apologies to the set designers of The Donnager/Rocinante on The Expanse, for when I said “Ugh, not the glass tile future computer trope again.”
To all the naysayers: if the claims hold up this will be super useful for some industries. Example, I worked at a human genomics lab for diagnostics. By law we were supposed to retain raw data for a whopping 120 years. With a couple terabyte per individual for a WGS, the storage and backup costs were very much non-trivial.
As a data analyst at mid-large corporation in America: please stop emailing me that the servers are nearly full. I need to store all of this to stay within regulations and you only give me one place to put my data outputs :(
Just wait until one of your techs drops a cassette of these glass and ceramic plates and suddenly your company is out 100,000TB of data.
The whole “it can last 5000 years” thing is somewhat ridiculous considering the library mechanisms, carriers for the slides and basically everything else not glass and ceramic probably won’t last more than 20 or 30.
It is possible to make glass and ceramics that are resistant to shattering from fair hard impacts. I don’t know if that can be employed here, but there are other ways to deal with the problem.
Additionally, if 100,000 TB is something that people can carry by hand, then it is also possible to back up those drives relatively easily (relative to that technology).
Lastly, current silicon fabs have boxes of wafers that at the final stages can exceed $1M in the retail value. They have robots that handle those. If the 100,000 TB is worth something close to that, then a human will not be carrying it.
Lastly, current silicon fabs have boxes of wafers that at the final stages can exceed $1M in the retail value. They have robots that handle those. If the 100,000 TB is worth something close to that, then a human will not be carrying it.
Pharma has entered the chat…they just have warehouse people riding forklifts with pallets worth much more than $1M.
I’m sure pharmacy has some crazy value density, but it’s hards to put accurate values on their products because of insurance.
The boxes of wafers I was talking about is roughly 1.5 ft cubed. The fabs will have hundreds of these boxes moving around by robots at any one time.
possible to make glass and ceramics that are resistant to shattering from fair hard impacts.
As far as I know, there is 1 storage technology that has survived wars. Paper.
Isn’t that a concern with other tech too? If storage is cheaper, it would enable for more redundant copies
A lot of places just don’t have backups. I’m thinking of hospitals getting hit with ransomware attacks, some are fine and just pull from backups and others shell out lots of money.
I’d love to see cheaper enterprise storage since it’ll be easier to justify more backups. That single IT guy managing a hospital network could use a break…
Having backups at multiple sites is industry standard. Nobody is keeping 100,000TB of data in a single location.
As for your second point, I don’t see the relevance. You can store the glass wherever you want, the other mechanisms aren’t relevant for keeping the stored data.
But ceramic plates can probably be put into a working enclosure to get the data from it again
Just like how if you put a shattered CD in an apparatus, you can still use a laser reader to recover any data on the undamaged sections.
Though, because data is recorded in a circular pattern at high speeds, you won’t get much. Or what you get will have lots of corruption. I wonder what pattern of storage these plates use? If it’s similar to SSDs, then large files can be nested in a very small area of space - increasing the chances of recovery.
I don’t think consumer use is even on Cerabyte’s roadmap. They are proposing rack-mounted units for datacenters, and the roadmap includes upgrading from lasers to electron microscopes for higher density in the future. The media are super dense but the equipment to read and write that media is large and complex.
There was some discussion on this a few months back in this thread, as well: https://lemmy.world/post/4695105
As I noted in that other thread, they were set to present at the Storage Developer Conference in October. Looks like the video of their presentation is available now. I have not yet watched it. https://storagedeveloper.org/events/agenda/session/527
Edit: Looking through their presentation PDF, they refer to access times from 10 seconds to 90 seconds. That’s whole seconds, no milli, micro, or nano. More a substitute for archival tapes than hard drives or SSDs. They don’t seem to address any use case besides cold storage. I’m not saying that to dismiss or criticize the tech, just to point out that the linked article seems to be off target in its analysis, particularly in the headline.
Data hoarders will love it if it’s cheaper than current storage methods. How much would you need to pay for 10PB right now?
The storage plates probably won’t cost much, but the capabilities it uses to write to those plates looks extremely expensive and won’t be fitting into your computer tower any time soon.
“Any time soon” is the thing. Look at the history of hard disk drives. To store 3.75MB in 1957 on a hard disk, a single hard disk was the size of two refrigerators. By the 1980s they were 8 inches (~20cm) big stored 10 MB. Nowadays they are 3.5 inches (~9 cm) big and can store multiple TB.
Technology has accelerated considerably. Even if it takes 20 years, it might still be quicker than the hard disk to home timeline.
Yes, but there’s different problems at hand now. 60 years ago the entire driving force in computers consisted of making things smaller. A hard drive 50 years ago worked like a hard drive from 20 years ago. Just shrunk. Same for processors.
Well now we’re running out of room to shrink. We had to change hard drives completely. Processors started going multi core, and in the case of these ceramic drives: lasers can’t get much smaller and stay powerful enough to write, and magnifying lenses also can’t keep shrinking.
Aside from that, this tech is all physical, which means noise, and no one wants to go back to hearing noisy hard drives again. Lol
