“the medium is silica crystal, similar to optical cable, it’s highly durable. It’s also capacious: The technology can store up to 360 TB of data on a 5-inch glass platter.”

  • dparticiple@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    A friendly request - please de-clickbait your headlines and say what the material is (although you do mention it in your summary).

  • ieatpwns@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I wonder what the read write speed is. Imagine storing your entire movie collection in a crystal the size of a coaster.

    Might not be for home consumers anytime soon, article says: “In the next 18 months, the company hopes to have a field-deployable read device that customers can use to read archived data. But SPhotonix isn’t presently targeting the consumer market. Kazansky estimates that the initial cost of the read device will be about $6,000 and the initial cost of the write device will be about $30,000.”

    Then goes on to mention they need about 3-4 years of R&D so they can be ready to license the tech

    • Yggstyle@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      That’s the joke. The speed of a lot of these tech would require twice the time the data retention to write it.

      We can place atoms in order on the head of this pin and store 30 Pb. Write speed? 1KB/min

    • Zachariah@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      That’s cheap enough a small business could do long term backups for individuals and other small businesses.

      • Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        I had the exact same idea, you could upload your data to cloud storage, and have them write it to the doodad and send it to you.

        • Zachariah@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          and/or provide them cloud access to their crystal since they may not want to buy a reader

    • kalkulat@lemmy.worldOP
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      8 months ago

      Manipulating the atoms in a crystal to store info is extremely high-precision, as is verifying the accuracy of the write). So is reading positions down to a few nanometers, But consumers wouldn’t need a $6000 reader to get, say, 10GB dumped to a hard drive … you’d carry your crystal and 16GB drive down to the corner store and user their reader to dump sector 37BJ to the drive. No need to trust them with your platter … but are you exposing all 360TB to potential damage from the machine?

  • Midnight Wolf@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    This grinds my gears any time that a product is touted as lasting X time. Did you put it through a typical use case or scenario for that X time? No? Then you cannot definitively say that it will last that long.

    Based on their bullshit statement, I can last 7 years pounding someone’s ass relentlessly without pause for any reason. Trust me bro.

    • nexguy@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      You can stimulate wear on different types of materials and get a general idea of how long it would last. This isn’t plastic in a dvd.

    • arbitrary_sarcasm@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I mean, people do predict things based on evidence. Galileo didn’t actually go to outer space and verify that the earth was going around the sun.

      • Midnight Wolf@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Unsure if joke or not, ha. I don’t even remember what I set in my bio for FL, its been a couple years since I set that account up…

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Beyond that, the sun has about 5 billion years before we might not be able to starlift it back to a “younger” state, so The Earth and Venus may not exist at all if we don’t get our asses in gear for sustainable intragalactic life in the next century or so.

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    and just like every other storage medium, it will last for eons…and die about .5 femtoseconds before you have a critical need to pull data off.

    • kalkulat@lemmy.worldOP
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      8 months ago

      What if some civilization in the past already had something like this, and there are ‘plates’ or pieces of rock out there (under sand dunes? written in the sides of those vases from ancient Egypt?)

      Could they make portable readers that can at least spot old pottery chunks that are probably FULL of videos?

  • Raxiel@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Open AI just bought out all the glass platter production. Not only will consumers not be able to store their data for 14gy, they won’t have anywhere to set down their drinks either

  • Jarix@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Permanent storage. Like the Wayback massive and internet archive I hope will fully take advantage of these. As well as project Gutenberg. So much else. I’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time

  • sramder@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Meh…. Japan’s been pitching holographic data storage since the early 2Ks — at least —LMK when I can buy a magic holographic zip drive and I’ll be back.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Idk about “useless”. But the way the article doesn’t seem to want to mention the read/write speed is definitely indicative of some drawbacks to the medium. They repeatedly stress “cold storage” which could mean its a useful form of long term archive or backup for static data. Plenty of demand for that kind of information, especially in an era when real time overwriting by malicious actors and artificial engines has been fucking with historical data retention.

      But its not going to replace your hard drive any time soon.