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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Something I sometimes think about is how much of humanity's history is just like, gone. Completely forgotten to time. Great works of art that'll never be seen. Amazing compositions that'll never again be heard. An uncalculable number of lifetimes reduced to nothing more than food for the dirt.
The proposition that we could store vast amounts of our current experience on archival slabs and preserve it all far into our distant future is incredibly exciting to me. It wouldn't only allow us to indefinitely preserve all of these incredible works of art our modern world has enabled. But would also allow us to more effectively learn from our collective societal mistakes. It would hopefully be more difficult to ignore our past foibles when we keep such detailed receipts... Hopefully.
If not at least they'll have SpongeBob in 7023 to distract from the cyber-nazis.
I can understand needing this tech for court records and similar stuff. Even for libraries which desire to store everything in the world. But that's about it. I don't think many people go to old backups and see their old documents or code they wrote. Photos, sure, but even that is not a frequent thing.