Researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology have developed an optical disc with a capacity of over a petabit of data, equivalent to well...
Anytime you get to that length, you always have to think about whether or not someone will have a drive to read it, a computer that it works on, and matching programs to decode the data. Think about some of the formats we had in the 70’s and 80’s and how often people actually have that hardware and software in working order now.
Optical discs are already incredibly resistant and shouldn't be expected to fail in your lifetime. Most of the times they do, it's either old media (cd and dvd both had physical flaws in design), damage, or mistakes in manufacturing.
There's really no reason for the discs to degrade. It's just stamped plastic.
As an optical media enthusiast, I’ve done a fair amount of research into how, why, and when discs fail. Because the discs use two or more polycarbonate layers pressed together, moisture can sometimes work its way between the layers and speed up degradation, especially if a disc has been overly flexed at the center. Heat and UV can also speed up degradation.
Another problem is that plastic is petroleum-based and it breaks down over time. A lot of people think that the reflective layer (the metal layer) is actually the data layer but it almost never is. The data layer itself is polycarbonate, sandwiched between the reflective layers and more polycarbonate layers.
The newer discs like blu-ray movies are made with better plastics that should last at least 100 years. Depending on the dye layer of writable and rewritable blu-rays, they should last either at least 25 years or 100 years.
When they say plastic takes [huge number] of years to decompose, they're talking about how long it takes to disappear completely. The usable lifetime for most plastic objects seems to be only a few decades. (I don't know about the specific plastic they use for optical discs, though.)
Pressed optical discs will last a very long time. The lifetime of burned discs depends on the type of dye that's used to store the data. Many of the early CD-R's would get corrupted after a few years, but that was solved a long time ago.
Since the realistic competitor here is probably magnetic tape, current-generation (LTO9) media can transfer at around 400MB/s, taking 12 hours and change to fill an 18TB tape.
Earlier archival optical disk formats (https://news.panasonic.com/global/stories/798) claimed 360MB/s, but I believe that is six, double-sided discs writing both sides simultaneously, so 30MB/s per stream. Filling the same six (300GB) discs would take about an hour and a half.
Building the library to handle and read/write in bulk is always the issue though. The above optical system fit 1.9PB in the space of a server rack (and I didn't see any options to expand further when that was current technology), and by the looks is 7 units that each can be writing a set of discs (call that 2.5GB/s total).
In the same single rack you'd fit 560 LTO tapes (10.1PB for LTO9) and 21 drives (8.4GB/s).
So they have a bit of catching up to do, especially with LTO10 (due in the next year or so) doubling the capacity and further increasing the throughput.
There's also the small matter that every one of these massive increases in optical disc capacity in recent years has turned out to be vapourware. I mean I don't doubt that they will achieve it someday, but they always seem to go nowhere.
So optical drives will make a come back perhaps? Guess this means we'll have malware similar to in the early days where it would spontaneously open your CD-ROM drive "as a cupholder."
Listen, the idea isn't that you'll have a walkman that has every YouTube video you'll ever watch on it.
It's that you'd backup an entire fucking enterprise on one disc. Schedule it daily. Pay the support team to swap the disc out every night. Who needs infrastructure for ransomware, we got DISCS!
I suppose with that much data capacity they could halve the storage and add redundancy. My question is will it only have 1 reading head? That much data is going to take a very long time to read, unless they're doing multiple layers at a time,
What of you put it on an enclosure that has the disk(potentially even more stacked on top of each other) plus all the hardware needed to read the disk. Then all you would need is to provide power and plug in a data cable.
Believe it or not, first gen DVD-RAM came exactly like this. But manufacturers cheaped out / wanted the drives to be more easily compatible with CDs. So the caddys were scrapped.
Here I thought that was because nearly no one uses them anymore. The large volume of folks who didn't coddle their DVDs are Netflix subscribers now, the few people who do still bother to buy movies or games on disc are the folks who care about them, and thus don't leave them on the TV stand to get scratched.
I'd said over on the Old Place back during the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD wsrs that people really liked their 7" optical media. I got down voted to hell for it then, but I'm glad to see I wasn't totally wrong.
Cheap, high density media has its applications. Tape is still the preferred long-term storage medium for backups in a lot of industy sectors because still stores gobs of data, it's dirt cheap, compact, light and it transports easily. If you don't need it to be fast, or you're regularly producing large scale data sets that are essentially disposable after some time, then it's a good compromise.
No reason this tech couldn't step into that niche when it hits the right price point.
Yea but the tape is likely to last the 20-30 year estimate. You couldn't say the same about HDDs especially the helium sealed ones.
Whether the tape drive will survive as well is another question but between the simpler mechanism, a drive 2 generations ahead can still read the tape, parts inter-compatibility if you needed to frankenstein an older drive with new rollers and motors and just plain buying and keeping drives sealed in storage as new-old-stock ahead of time. You have a few options to choose from.
Where as with HDDs you may have to repair each one. The helium ones you may have to re-gas.
Tape sounds like a better long term archival/backup approach.
This is great, I have a NAS and I still get slow data corruption for my long term data even using bit-rot resilient file systems. I would like a way to back up 5Tb of photos and videos on a single disc to bury somewhere for long term (decades) storage.
that's neat and all but the headline reads a lot like those usb batteries advertisements claiming 15000 mAh capacity - the big number means it's better! but lol no it's only 15amps.
200tb enterprise level storage is good - if it has a really long shelf life, like 10+ years. your critical backups are only good if the data doesnt degrade or the storage media doesnt fail when you're doing a DR.
Unless the 1.6petabytes is all photos you have ever taken of people and all the photos and videos everyone has ever taken of you and all your family, I hope there's a way for a person to wrap their mind around having 1.6petabits. maybe it's a big text file that draws your name from random text characters to the order of 1.6petabits. it could be mostly just zeros.