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."
Look if you can trade a little over a hundred isolinear processing chips for a goddamn space cannon it's gotta be worth it
I'm pretty sure that trope is 100% about being able to use the actors' faces while they're doing computer stuff. Same as why space suits always have lights inside the helmets, which would be an insanely bad idea IRL.
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 :(
As a regular computer user: please stop telling me my OneDrive is full, I don't even use it, I have no idea how it filled up
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.
You're not playing Lemmy correctly. The highest rated post must always be a half-hearted pessimistic lazy criticism of whatever new technology is being described.
then a Han Wo to be carrying it.
Who dat
That’s… literally always a concern. Name a digital storage medium impervious to impact damage. You can’t.
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
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?
I have been waiting for the results of project silica for awhile. The fact there are potential alternatives is very exciting to hear. The hoard is not getting any smaller.
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.
Wow, more amazing technology I can't wait to never hear about again...
Ceramic drives have been in the news for a few years now. They have been edging towards commercial availability for a while. It might take a while until they become available to consumers like yourself, but it's not like nothing is happening.
Holographic storage has been around for about 20 years now. Where's my holographic drive?
Looks like you saw right through the marketing. Seems like that product failed to materialize. It fairs to reason those claims were intangible.
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't wait to never be able to afford this
This will never be for the average consumer. By their marketing alone I can tell you they're pretty much exclusively targeting large data centers with this tech.
Interesting.
How many write-erase cycles can be done?
I don't think this is rewritable storage, this looks to be permanent forever storage. So you wouldn't put this in a regular computer.
0, it's write once read anytime you feel brave enough to dig through 10000TB of data.
I know it was said before in previous decades as storage evolved, but: How the fuck, do you eve fill these up?
That's only 10 Petabytes per cartridge. The Internet Archive is currently sitting at 212 Petabytes.
Just wait. Triple AAA devs will find a way to make their code even less optimal so that way the latest call of duty or NBA games will be 5tb in size while also receiving 5tb updates every other day to fix bugs and add paywalled content and gambli- I mean loot boxes.
I like to think of them as IPv6 addresses. You just don't.
Call of Duty updates
Now if they could only make one that only costs a couple thousand dollars and fits in a full height 5.25" drive bay.
I thought latency was measured in seconds for these?
At 10,000tb, it could have a latency of 5 minutes and it'd probably still be useful for long term storage.
Edit: it's also useful to note that it sounds like these are write-once, read many. That means for consumers, they might eventually replace Blurays, but they probably won't be replacing your hard drive.
Yeah that would be the only useful use case. However I think with even a few seconds of latency I could deal with that for things like video playback since it would quite literally up my storage by a few orders of magnitude.
Yeah it wasn't so long ago that hard drive storage was more expensive than spindles of CD-Rs and that was around the time that internet and torrenting were taking off. People used to burn CDs full of movies to share and make room to download more. In that use case a unit of 700 MB on write once read many storage was useful if cheap.
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