The drives are write-once media — data cannot be erased or rewritten once stored
I could find a use for these. My pacman package cache maybe.
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
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Awesome for archival
At 10MB/s it'd take you 416 days if constant writes to fill it up.
EXTREMELY slow archival.
At least for now, till it gets better
If you're not creating more than 800GB a day of new data you can just let it run with a faster drive as a buffer in front of it.
Or get 10 of them and run them in parallel. Maybe get 11 and throw in a bit of parity, just in case bitrot surfaces after the first 1000 years or something.
Let's say I want to preserve my computer disks when I do a major change (i.e. 10TB worth of NAS or just 4TB worth of workstation) or when I sell it or just throw it away. What do I do? Time is not essential. Or as others said, store photos and other large files. It's for archival, not for backup purposes.
i would download everything i could i have one of these.
I would like a couple please!
A perfect RAID setup does not exi...
Read and single write capability is an interesting proposition for archival purposes. 8-10MB/s write and 50-200MB/s read speeds
Archival CD-burning is back, baby!
I do photography, and I like to keep the original RAW photos from the camera. So, this sort of thing would be perfect for me. I don't really need fast write access, since I just want to back the photos up and it's not time sensitive.
Wonder how rough bit rot would be though.
What form would that take? They seem to indicate lifetime on the centuries, similar to expectations for M-DISC.
Gonna guess glass deformation over time is going to come into play (really (like millennia) old windows get thicker at the bottom), probably why the quartz version of this is speculated to be good for millions of years. And of course breakage. The drives will fail first.
Sucks to be Microslop sitting on this for years and years and China comes along and eats your lunch. Ha Ha.
Hopefully a story soon to be repeated with RAM and then chips, about time there was real competition and innovation in this space, too many cartels due to high capex siloing. This looks more like CDs, could be everywhere in a few years.
Glass flowing to be thicker at the bottom is a myth.
Yeah, I've heard that and I've seen pictures of examples, dunno. Personally, anything beyond a century is irrelevant anyway.
Spin them once daily or weekly. As long as they're balanced that should randomize the gravity vector.
It's also almost certainly a different composition than century old glass panes made for buildings. So the material itself might mitigate this issue
Like the other user mentioned, glass warping/deformation. Although I'd reckon kinetic impacts, tremors, or actual drive failure would occur first (the real question is what are the maximum tolerances before a read/write fails or ends in data corruption).
More bytes is more bytes. Flood the market until big AI firms can’t afford to monopolize the hardware anymore and finally collapse so we real people can finally compute again.
These would be useless for AI given the high write requirements inherent to any form of 'AI' in use today; but data centers would absolute eat these up for low-write CDN usage, i.e. netflix which only updates their catalogue once every few days but needs high read speeds for multiple users. So we'd still be competing with data centers for them, but luckily just much fewer.
It would make (assuming it can fit in a standard 3.5" bay) petabyte+ home data servers pretty trivial to set up though which is pretty neat. 4k Jellyfin data hoarders should rejoice.
Like I said, more bytes is more bytes. Even if it’s a niche use case, that takes pressure off of other use cases.