A 1 Petabit DVD-like disc has been created

[Uttamattamakin]

Summary

Optical Disk are BACK! At least they might be if/when this type of disk becomes a commodity product.  125,000 gigabytes on a single DVD-sized disk.  125 terabytes of storage in a DVD like disk.  UPDATE.  In very related news from the same lab and as reported by Ieee  they now have a 1.6 petabit version.   

 

Quotes

Quote

There’s good news if you’re running out of space on your Google account. Researchers from Scientists from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology just figured out how to fit up to a petabit of data onto an optical disk by storing information in 3D. In other words, that’s 125,000 gigabytes on a single DVD-sized disk, or what experts refer to as a “big boy.”

 

Optical disks like DVDs and Blu-rays are cheap and durable but can’t hold much data. Until now, optical disks store data in a single layer of information that’s read using a laser. Well, you can kiss those puny disks goodbye thanks to a new technique that can read and write up to 100 layers of data in the space of just 54-nanometres, as described in a new paper published in the journal Nature.

 

Abstract of the Nature Paper. 

Quote

High-capacity storage technologies are needed to meet our ever-growing data demands1,2. However, data centres based on major storage technologies such as semiconductor flash devices and hard disk drives have high energy burdens, high operation costs and short lifespans2,3. Optical data storage (ODS) presents a promising solution for cost-effective long-term archival data storage. Nonetheless, ODS has been limited by its low capacity and the challenge of increasing its areal density4,5. Here, to address these issues, we increase the capacity of ODS to the petabit level by extending the planar recording architecture to three dimensions with hundreds of layers, meanwhile breaking the optical diffraction limit barrier of the recorded spots. We develop an optical recording medium based on a photoresist film doped with aggregation-induced emission dye, which can be optically stimulated by femtosecond laser beams. This film is highly transparent and uniform, and the aggregation-induced emission phenomenon provides the storage mechanism. It can also be inhibited by another deactivating beam, resulting in a recording spot with a super-resolution scale. This technology makes it possible to achieve exabit-level storage by stacking nanoscale disks into arrays, which is essential in big data centres with limited space.

NEW IEEE Spectrum

 

Quote

The researchers note that the entire procedure used to create blank discs made using AIE-DDPR films is compatible with conventional DVD mass production and can be completed within 6 minutes. Gu says these new discs may therefore prove to be manufacturable at commercial scales.

Currently, he says, the new discs have a writing speed of about 100 milliseconds and an energy consumption of microjoules to millijoules.

Still, Gu says, the researchers would like to see their new discs used in big data centers. As a result, they’re working to improve their new method’s writing speed and energy consumption. He suggests this may be possible using new, more energy-efficient recording materials. He says more layers in each disc may be possible in the future, using better lenses and fewer aberrations in their optics.

 

My thoughts

My internal reaction was like. 

 

I think we have all had time to get used to clouds and downloading data however, we have also seen the drawbacks of this.  Things like not really owning your data.  The lack of an easy way to make a long term archive of your data etc etc.  

For example, I can reach for an old DVD I made in 2007, put it in the drive and watch a rip of a TV show first produced in 2003.  If I relied on cloud services that show is just gone.  I can watch old Anime or an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm that I downloaded off Lime Wire in 2002 or 2003 if I have it on CD or DVD.  CD and DVD type disk have proven with time that they can retain data as an archive that will last at least 20 years if stored correctly.  The biggest change the return of optical disk would bring is giving people a way to store their own data, and keep it basically forever with proper storage and maintenance. 

 

An equally big change will be a return of watching certain very VERY high-definition content.  Consider a 3D VR movie where you the viewer can view it from any angle.  You can explore the whole scene around it as if you are there.  Imagine a Forrest Gump 2 movie where you can talk to Forrest, and he reacts driven by an AI made to talk like him.   It's so much storage space ... imagine movies recorded in a  RAW format.  Pro Res Raw or Red Raw or whatever and not even having to encode things.    It's hard to imagine what would even fill such a disk. 

 

This is so much binary data it is hard to imagine how we might surpass it.   Maybe when we can store a 1 kilo qbit in a USB key sized device somehow?   

This is so much data it makes every other way of storing data that does not need to be overwritten obsolete IF and only IF it comes to market.    Right now this is just a research project but so was everything we are using right now. 

 

This peer reviewed, published research will not get the fanfare of other things but this is the real "We're Back" moment.  This is it. 2030's or 2040's your computer will have an optical drive again if this pans out. 

 

NEW thoughts.

Won't create an edit every time this advances but yeah work is ongoing.  Optical disc in the datacenter might be a thing.  That said if a type of media was created that could take advantage of all that space and Manufacuring for it can be ramped up  cheaply  ... getting tons of content on disc might be a thing again. 

 

At least for those who want to own a copy that they keep locally VS streaming.  Streaming everything, where you "buy" stuff but really only rent the right to stream it as long as they want to let you ... is just too convenient though.   

I know others disagree but not everyone, everyplace that might need access to a large data set is sitting at a workstation on campus of a college or univ or business.  There will be cases where burning a PBDVD or whatever they'll call it would make sense for at least some people. 

 

 

Sources

https://gizmodo.com/meet-the-super-dvd-scientists-develop-massive-1-petabi-1851272615

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06980-y

NEW https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-storage-petabit-optical-disc

[8tg]

Remember when archival discs were shown off a decade ago and we never saw them for years, and then finally they became niche deep storage solutions for massive data archives exclusively?

https://www.pcworld.com/article/444272/sony-panasonic-develop-300gb-optical-discs-for-enterprise-storage.html

Sure you can buy these if you want, 5tb cartridges are $200. But then the optical bays for them are $8000+

And then those products are aimed more at places like creative design organizations where they just have tons of media they have to store for whatever purpose. The real big ones aren’t available for anyone to just buy.

 

Every time this stuff is talked about it’s always this perception of a single dvd holding massive amounts of data and you just slam that disc into a laptop but it never is. When it gets to that point I doubt the idea of personal archiving will even be a thing.

[darknessblade]

31 minutes ago, 8tg said:

Remember when archival discs were shown off a decade ago and we never saw them for years, and then finally they became niche deep storage solutions for massive data archives exclusively?

https://www.pcworld.com/article/444272/sony-panasonic-develop-300gb-optical-discs-for-enterprise-storage.html

Sure you can buy these if you want, 5tb cartridges are $200. But then the optical bays for them are $8000+

And then those products are aimed more at places like creative design organizations where they just have tons of media they have to store for whatever purpose. The real big ones aren’t available for anyone to just buy.

 

Every time this stuff is talked about it’s always this perception of a single dvd holding massive amounts of data and you just slam that disc into a laptop but it never is. When it gets to that point I doubt the idea of personal archiving will even be a thing.

Not forgetting they often want you to buy at least 1000+ pieces, and get a expensive service contract as well.

essentially locking out the end-user from ever getting these drives NEW.

 

 

Most of these cardridges are also made to be written once or twice, then put in a climate controlled storage room, only accessed when you need the data. which then it is faster to copy everything than to look for that 1 specific 1GB image you created XXX years ago.

[wanderingfool2]

58 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

125,000 gigabytes on a single DVD-sized disk.  128 terabytes of storage in a DVD like disk. 

By the current measuring it's either 125 TB, or ~122TiB; not 128.

 

Just to put things in perspective, Sony offers a 1.5TB archival optical system (it's protected by a thicker case to not damage the disc by dust etc).  So that's only ~83.3 times more capacity; which while it would be great isn't like it's some miracle either (unless it's low cost...but no mention of cost)

 

 

Overall, I doubt this will go anywhere.  It seems like just another "oh look at what we've done" kind of tech that might have some ripple down but it won't find a practical use case to create a sustainable business model.

 

With that said the article is currently locked behind a paid subscription, so we can only rely on what the news sites are saying about it (and they are comically optimistic often about "up and coming" tech that never pans out).

 

So while they are saying 1 pb, which I think is deceiving as it seems like the authors are already aiming to create a headlining article.

 

At least from what is currently visible, I would say it's unclear if they actually created a prototype disc with actual capacity or if they simply create the coating and showed the potential for that capacity [without seeing the paper it's hard to tell].

 

It's similar to the other articles about storage technology...they promise the world, get research money, produce no products, then in 5 years time promise the world again saying they are close to commercial viability and rinse and repeat.

 

Media discs have issues with disc rot, not mentioned in abstract/article, and at those levels of density likely issues with keeping the disc free of contaminates...which means added cost.  Then the key is the whole manufacturing process.  CD/DVDs/BluRays were cheap because as a whole they could essentially be stamped and it's done.  If you are building up hundreds of layers on a single disc that will add cost and complexity (which likely means current facilities would need to be specialized in making it)

 

This overall is nothing new, there is a company already saying they have 1 TB discs

[ieleja]

52 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

128 terabytes of storage in a DVD like disk. 

Sounds great, but there is question about speed with this disk can be written. In one company I do company's Virtual Machines and SQL backups, one backup is weekly, on external USB3 16TB HDD, it takes 24+ hours (HDD internal speed is ~150 MB/sec).

[Uttamattamakin]

41 minutes ago, 8tg said:

Remember when archival discs were shown off a decade ago and we never saw them for years, and then finally they became niche deep storage solutions for massive data archives exclusively?

 

.... and holographic media.  

The problem and the reason these might not become like DVD's used on the desktop is because ... what would one store which would use one of these?    It's enough to store not just one movie but 100's of movies.  Unless it is some sort of new immersive content.  Basically, every movie would be like a video game. 

 

8 minutes ago, darknessblade said:

Most of these cardridges are also made to be written once or twice, then put in a climate controlled storage room, only accessed when you need the data. which then it is faster to copy everything than to look for that 1 specific 1GB image you created XXX years ago.

This sounds absurd BUT what you are describing is exactly what people did for a long time.  Before everything was digital one might look for hours in a library for a book that has that one image or picture you need.     Wanted to find out about a person one had to go to a library and do this. 

(All of that to get what we get in second now).

IF anything, it would be more convenient since one could have a disc like this with the contents of numerous libraries which would "google" on the disc for.  MS Encarta on a disc like this imagine the possibilities of what they could put on there.   

The scenario you outline is very possible but it could well be this leads to optical media people use. 

 

5 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

By the current measuring it's either 125 TB, or ~122TiB; not 128

Are you sure about that.

  

 

5 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

....

Likely due to production cost if this does go anywhere it may take a decade.  CD's and DVD's took 5-10 years after they were possible to take over the world.    Hard drives were things that existed only in data centers and VERY expensive computers for 10-20 years in the 60's and 70's  They weren't common until the mid 1980's. 

5 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

 

Media discs have issues with disc rot, not mentioned in abstract/article, and at those levels of density likely issues with keeping the disc free of contaminates...which means added cost.  Then the key is the whole manufacturing process.  CD/DVDs/BluRays were cheap because as a whole they could essentially be stamped and it's done.  If you are building up hundreds of layers on a single disc that will add cost and complexity (which likely means current facilities would need to be specialized in making it)

This is all true.  So, the caveat with proper storage.  That is true with any medium.  

 

We have clay and stone tablets from 4000 BC ... but even those are just fragments of the ones that didn't get smashed.  

[tikker]

That's pretty awesome. I'm curious about the longetivy. Ignoring that the drives may cost a fortune I'd love to store 100+ TB on a single disc, but with that amount of data on a single thing I would want it to be pretty robust if it's ever coming to home use.

 

24 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Are you sure about that.

  

 

Going with the SI prefixes peta is 10^15 and tera is 10^12. So in that case, if we divide 1 petabit by 8 you get 0.125 * 10^15 bytes, or 125 * 10^12 bytes, or 125 terabytes. If we take the binary "terabyte" or tebibyte (TiB) to be 1024^4 bytes then we get ~1.1 TB for every TiB which would give 125 TB / 1.1 TB/TiB = ~113.7 TiB. Not sure what conversion that calculator is doing, but also this decimal/binary unit stuff while keeping the same labels has been the most confusing we've ever made things tbh.

[manikyath]

there's a startup somewhere claiming to be working on something very similar.

 

the long and short of it is this: yes.. in a lab this is possible, but this tech will struggle severely in the real world, if it ever materializes at all.

 

this is really starting to feel very much like the RCA CED story.. in theory very cool, but by the time it gets to market it's gonna be too little too late, and lack reliability and usability compared to other products on the market.

 

also - for all they claim... this stuff is NOT a long term backup of your data. at least not any longer than the other stuff we already have.

 

more recent versions of LTO are pretty cool tech.. they're basicly taking the surface material of a hard drive platter and spooling it on a big roll, so you have a HUGE amount of surface area.. and as long as you store them well, LTO will do 30 years on the shelf. at which point you probably have long since migrated your backup to a newer platform.

 

in all of this i must also add.. it's hard for me to imagine a "super DVD" burner, and a spindle of "super DVD's" isnt gonna be cheaper than just a pair of hard drives. and for as much as they talk about the incredible amount of storage space.. there's the contrast between lab and reality, and the decades of technological advancement before this comes to market.

 

case in point.. some years ago there was a lab test that got 10 gigabit over a pots phone line. if that was truly feasible, we wouldnt be sticking fiber in the ground literally everywhere now.

[wanderingfool2]

21 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Are you sure about that.

  

Yes, you are mixing units of measurements.

 

Your statement of 125,000 Gigabytes, if you put it into any convert will never produce 128 TB; instead if you assume it's written as GiB or GB as the stated 125,000 it's the 125 or 122 as I stated. [where in all things considered it's probably the 125 version].

 

Your unit convert you are using assumes 1 petabit = 1024 terabits.  It's all well and good to maybe assume that, except in physical media the measurement typically uses 1 petabit = 1000 terabits (bigger number looks better).

 

It is factually wrong to state though 125,000 gigabytes is equivalent to 128 terabytes though...no matter which unit of measurement you are using.

[Uttamattamakin]

7 minutes ago, tikker said:

That's pretty awesome. I'm curious about the longetivy. Ignoring that the drives may cost a fortune I'd love to store 100+ TB on a single disc, but with that amount of data on a single thing I would want it to be pretty robust if it's ever coming to home use.

 

Going with the SI prefixes peta is 10^15 and tera is 10^12. So in that case, if we divide 1 petabit by 8 you get 0.125 * 10^15 bytes, or 125 * 10^12 bytes, or 125 terabytes. If we take the binary "terabyte" or tebibyte (TiB) to be 1024^4 bytes then we get ~1.1 TB for every TiB which would give 125 TB / 1.1 TB/TiB = ~113.7 TiB. Not sure what conversion that calculator is doing, but also this decimal/binary unit stuff while keeping the same labels has been the most confusing we've ever made things tbh.

True.  Wolfram alpha has.

 

 

 

[Uttamattamakin]

40 minutes ago, ieleja said:

Sounds great, but there is question about speed with this disk can be written. In one company I do company's Virtual Machines and SQL backups, one backup is weekly, on external USB3 16TB HDD, it takes 24+ hours (HDD internal speed is ~150 MB/sec).

That's an interesting point.  Theoretically how long would it take to write such a disc at the best possible speed.  Suppose it could write to disc half as fast as a PCIE 5 could feed data to the device.  

 

5 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Yes, you are mixing units of measurements.

 

No I'm commenting on a website and I used google to find a unit converter that is apparently wrong.  Now that I found a different unit converter I have edited it.   My mistake was relying on the wrong unit converter.   

[Uttamattamakin]

7 minutes ago, manikyath said:

there's a startup somewhere claiming to be working on something very similar.

 

the long and short of it is this: yes.. in a lab this is possible, but this tech will struggle severely in the real world, if it ever materializes at all.

 

this is really starting to feel very much like the RCA CED story.. in theory very cool, but by the time it gets to market it's gonna be too little too late, and lack reliability and usability compared to other products on the market.

 

also - for all they claim... this stuff is NOT a long term backup of your data. at least not any longer than the other stuff we already have.

I have a DVD that has a copy of GTA San Andreas whith the Hot Coffee Mod.  I can still install and almost play it but for issues of compatibility.  It dates to 2004.  I think 20 years is pretty long term.   

Now will people be able to boot up a copy of the infamous reality TV show "There's Something About Miriam" and get a feel for early 21st century attitudes towards people like her and I in 2124 from the DVD I created of it in 2007.  Probably not but possibly.   No storage medium last forever. 

 

 

7 minutes ago, manikyath said:

more recent versions of LTO are pretty cool tech.. they're basicly taking the surface material of a hard drive platter and spooling it on a big roll, so you have a HUGE amount of surface area.. and as long as you store them well, LTO will do 30 years on the shelf. at which point you probably have long since migrated your backup to a newer platform.

 

in all of this i must also add.. it's hard for me to imagine a "super DVD" burner, and a spindle of "super DVD's" isnt gonna be cheaper than just a pair of hard drives. and for as much as they talk about the incredible amount of storage space.. there's the contrast between lab and reality, and the decades of technological advancement before this comes to market.

I agree with the above.  IF IF this is a thing then it will be like how Hard Drives took decades from invention to filter into use .  

Imagine being in the 2040's or 2050's and having some people born in the 2030's telling us how great this new optical media is .... never been anything like it.  LOL. 

 

7 minutes ago, manikyath said:

 

case in point.. some years ago there was a lab test that got 10 gigabit over a pots phone line. if that was truly feasible, we wouldnt be sticking fiber in the ground literally everywhere now.

Are you sure of that.  Where I live the Phone company had been keen on the idea of running fiber only to a box in each neighborhood... then using copper and something like you described ... more and more advanced DSL to get internet into homes.   i.e. Within apartment buildings.   Fiber inside a building is possible but is it really the best in that case.   You know.  When will I have fiber right into my PC? 

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Are you sure of that.  Where I live the Phone company had been keen on the idea of running fiber only to a box in each neighborhood... then using copper and something like you described ... more and more advanced DSL to get internet into homes.   i.e. Within apartment buildings.   Fiber inside a building is possible but is it really the best in that case.   You know.  When will I have fiber right into my PC? 

over here one ISP is going for fiber to every home, and the other ISP is going for fiber to the node, and then runs literal douzens of coax cables under every street. even if fiber doesnt come into your home, it is more and more finding it's way into the last mile, and copper is more a "last yards" kind of tech these days.

 

but, we're not putting 10gig across that copper, case in point.. my ISP "only" gets just past a gigabit out of their coax.

 

the point is that even if they made it do 10gig in the lab, it will NEVER do 10gig in the real world.

[wanderingfool2]

Just now, Uttamattamakin said:

No I'm commenting on a website and I used google to find a unit converter that is apparently wrong.  Now that I found a different unit converter I have edited it.   My mistake was relying on the wrong unit converter.   

The unit convert isn't wrong; it produces the correct result for the assumptions it makes.  It's just that it makes the assumption of the definition of GB.

 

GiB and GB can functionally be the same thing depending on who you ask, it wasn't well defined at the beginning...there is a push to have GiB and GB stand for different things but it's been engrained in so many OS's and software that realistically it won't ever have a proper distinction.

 

The unit calculator is taking 1 petabit, with the assumption it's a pib, doing the conversion to tib which would result in 1024 tib, then conversion of bits to bytes/8. 128 terabytes.  This wouldn't be wrong to say, it's just you will get people who insist that tera and tebi are well defined and should only ever be used to stand for the 1000 for tera and 1024 for tebi [which across computer science it wasn't really standardized or there has always been overlap in what the word tera meant].

 

Instead it's dependent on the context (and clarification).  e.g. 8 GB of ram as sold by the manufacturer is 8 GiB and presents in Windows as 8GB, but 8 GB of an SSD by the manufacturer shows up as 7.4GiB on the system and windows presents it as 7.4GB of space.

 

RAM makers typically use GB to mean GiB; and HDD's use the redefinition of GB to be 1,000,000,000 bytes...it's actually something they used to write on HDD packages in fine print.

 

So the converter isn't wrong, it's about mixing the types; as if you ever see a statement of 125,000,000 GB from a 1 Pb then you know they assumed the SI meaning; and thus you can't convert 1Pb down to Tb using 1024, instead using 1000.

 

47 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

This is all true.  So, the caveat with proper storage.  That is true with any medium.  

While it is true about any medium, we know the writable media does have issues with certain materials in CD's.

 

It's why we replace archive tapes over time, and we replace SSD's overtime or we re-write data onto the SSD's and HDD's...because we know how they decay overtime.  CD's, especially late in game when they were tried to be made cheaply had the tendency to get CD rot within even a few years of being written to (if they weren't stored correctly).  It's why the longevity is a critical factor in any of these kinds of technologies, because it does no good if the data only remains stable for a short period of time as the dyes degrade or if the read lasers can cause extra wear.

 

51 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Likely due to production cost if this does go anywhere it may take a decade.  CD's and DVD's took 5-10 years after they were possible to take over the world.    Hard drives were things that existed only in data centers and VERY expensive computers for 10-20 years in the 60's and 70's  They weren't common until the mid 1980's. 

Except that this isn't a technology that everyone would be getting their hands on.

 

CD's were always relatively cheap to produce, the equipment to play them and the market wasn't there so it was sold at higher prices.  Same with DVD's.

Harddrives it's because the development meant they weren't the size of desks (which was insanely costly).

 

Unless they show a method of cheap production initially, this technology will be dead on arrival. (But again, it's difficult to assess because the paper is behind a paywall)

 

The tl;dr though.  I never really trust anything journals say about an emerging storage technology unless they have actual POC's that are shown to either rely on current manufacturing processes or can be shown to easily be implemented into an already running process.

 

[Zando_]

2 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

 It's so much storage space ... imagine movies recorded in a  RAW format.  Pro Res Raw or Red Raw or whatever and not even having to encode things.

Just remember that RAW is what it says it is, it's the raw data dumped from the image sensor with 0 processing. A movie in RAW would look like garbage, the films you actually watch have had a bunch of color grading done to make them look... whatever is "good" for the aesthetic the director was going for, be that stylized or realistic. Here's an example from Adobe of a RAW vs JPEG (automatically processed by the camera) image:

 

That aside, the tech does seem really cool. As others have said, I don't know that it'll take off though. There's other reasons companies prefer digital over physical (lower overhead cost, executive paranoia about "ooh scary piracy", etc) that'll hamper their use, especially for consumers. 

[wanderingfool2]

37 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

Just remember that RAW is what it says it is, it's the raw data dumped from the image sensor with 0 processing.

Well my guess is that it's just using the wrong terminology.

 

Instead I gather it's probably a lossless quality being referenced; instead of lossy

 

With that said, lossless you would get maybe 2:1 compression ratio (during noisy peak frames)...so

4k = 8294400 pixels

12 bits per color on bluray quality, 3 colors so = 36 bits per pixel

or 298598400 bits per frame, 37324800 bytes per frame or 37.32 MB per frame.

24 frames per second (cinematic type, it gets worse if you assume the 60 frames some are shooting at), ~895MB/second

 

Reduce by 2 for compression, that's still nearly 450MB/s.  The fastest a blu-ray can currently read is 72MB/second.  The practicality of lossless video doesn't really make too much sense...actually even that's pushing what a moderate SSD might be capable of doing. 

 

Mark my words, this technology will not be for home use.  This will only ever potentially be effective on the corporate side of things.  People don't care about the quality of videos anymore, if they did Blu-rays would still be something people buy over their digital copies.

 

[Quackers101]

when posted before, but now has anything really changed?

but I do wonder how it deals with bad content, writing errors, can use multiple lasers? (as that tech is also getting quite fancy too)

some said those cube storages could have a very long lifetime and if the same is for the bits inside of it? not sure what they used here.

kind of fun ideas hopefully we can see some fun DVD like storage and multi level/layer possibilities.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Summary

Optical Disk are BACK! At least they might be if/when this type of disk becomes a commodity product.  125,000 gigabytes on a single DVD-sized disk.  125 terabytes of storage in a DVD like disk. 

 

 

 

We've also increasingly seen that optical media is slow and unreliable. It doesn't matter how much you can store or compress data when the means to access or decompress it remains elusive after the hardware is no longer manufactured.

 

Sure you can still play a CD in a BD player, but that's only because customers (eg Sony Music) want it to. If you saw the first iteration of the Japanese PS3 you'd see the many directions Sony tried to pull the PS3 into being a media player that nearly all of it was ditched because the PS3 was just not good for playing anything except games.

 

4 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

 

For example, I can reach for an old DVD I made in 2007, put it in the drive and watch a rip of a TV show first produced in 2003.  If I relied on cloud services that show is just gone.  I can watch old Anime or an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm that I downloaded off Lime Wire in 2002 or 2003 if I have it on CD or DVD.  CD and DVD type disk have proven with time that they can retain data as an archive that will last at least 20 years if stored correctly.  The biggest change the return of optical disk would bring is giving people a way to store their own data, and keep it basically forever with proper storage and maintenance. 

 

Most CD-R's recorded between 1995 and 2003 are likely not working. This is because CD-R's lack protective coatings on both sides of the disc, scratching the label side by using the wrong kind of pen destroyed them.

 

Hell, I was packing things up and I looked at my crate of CD-R's from the late 90's/early 2000's and while I've only looked at one or two of these discs in the last decade, it's pretty clear that a lot of them likely don't work because the color of the disc is almost orange from silver.

 

Meanwhile the DVD spool, still looks silver.

 

But just because DVD-R's were cheap, didn't mean they lasted forever. It's still an organic dye being burned, it will still slowly decay if exposed to the wrong kind of light or environment.

 

I'd like to move away from "spinning" media, and to forms of solid state media that works perpetually. Even the damn USB protocol isn't robust enough to do this. Heck we've seen three iterations of "disk" storage, ATA/PATA, SATA, and NVMe, and USB protocols not keeping up (BOT and UAS), so the end result is that you end up having to keep around old computers or old unreliable USB hardware just in case you need to access stuff from old media.

 

Optical media has not been around as long, and hasn't enjoyed widespread support ever since Apple decided to drop the optical drive in 2011. 

 

So I expect that unless a future optical media comes out that is as fast as NVMe drives are, but cheaper than mechanical drivesin cost per GB, it will likely never become something that people buy into.

[tim0901]

5 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

*snip*

This seems really cool, but I think it's important to look at another project going on at the moment: Microsoft's Project Silica. Which already has working prototypes of non-degrading (on the scale of millenia) cloud storage systems for archival data - using similar sized glass slates with a capacity upwards of 7TB - which are already seeing throughput similar to that of conventional tape-based archival systems. Microsoft wont give any timescales, but given the technology has gone from a 300KB proof of concept in a university lab back in 2013 to prototype storage libraries of basically infinite capacity a decade later, it's probably not going to be that long before they begin to appear commercially. I really wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft started offering glass backups to Azure customers within the next 5-10 years.

 

If they can massively improve their write speeds, sure I can see this technology having potential in datacentres - massive improvements in density could result in huge power savings. But for archival storage? I just don't really see the benefit over a completely immutable (and dirt cheap) medium like glass that, if I were to guess, is probably going to reach the market first.

[Uttamattamakin]

5 hours ago, Zando_ said:

Just remember that RAW is what it

4 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Well my guess is that it's just using the wrong terminology.

 

 

says it is, it's the raw data dumped from the image sensor with 0 processing. ....

Sure but who knows by the time this is a thing... a media player will use AI to make that footage look the best it can on whatever you play it on.  

@wanderingfool2 who is it?

 

Anyway see above "it" is thinking about what near future tech can do with this. 

 

 

[Uttamattamakin]

3 hours ago, tim0901 said:

This seems really cool, but I think it's important to look at another project going on at the moment: Microsoft's Project Silica.

The cool part of this is you having your disc in your drawer. Maybe it's just me but I think the idea of once again having a high fidelity copy of software or entertainment that I can look at and make copies of  for my personal use, in perpetuity is good.

 

The thing about cloud storage even if it's your own data is ...if you really look at the fine print of the contract your licensing the storage space. Licensing the space, for your data and if you don't pay they can cut you off from your data and delete it.  So the idea of having something for those who want to not have to pay extortionate amounts of money, for large amounts of storage, to Archive videos documents and the ever-increasing amount of data we all create, is a good thing.

 

But then I can always use my job to justify the cost and write it off.  It's all scientific data.

[PocketNerd]

Isn't using Petabit instead of Petabyte a bit misleading given that the average user is accustomed to Terabytes, Gigabytes, and Megabytes?

 

Don't get me wrong, 125 - 128 Terabytes (depending on who you ask, apparently) is still massive in terms of consumer-level storage. But this is like saying that something is 10,000,000 cm long when it's just 100 km long in a more sane level of representation at this point. Would still be amazing, just without the needless shock value.

[Uttamattamakin]

1 minute ago, PocketNerd said:

Isn't using Petabit instead of Petabyte a bit misleading given that the average user is accustomed to Terabytes, Gigabytes, and Megabytes?

The other way around.   There are bits and bits are bits.  But BYTES can be 1000 or 1024.  Some OS's I think windows calles 1024 a MB.  While OSX and Linux call 1024 a MiB.  So calling it a petabit is good.  

That said to me if they had called it a 120 + Tebibit storage that might confuse the average person because as I said, most people are used to what Windows and Dos did for the longest time.  At the same time saying it could store the equivalent of over 120  1Terabytes drives or 120 times the amount of cloud storage most people have would be better. 

 

1 minute ago, PocketNerd said:

 

Don't get me wrong, 125 - 128 Terabytes (depending on who you ask, apparently) is still massive in terms of consumer-level storage. But this is like saying that something is 10,000,000 cm long when it's just 100 km long in a more sane level of representation at this point. Would still be amazing, just without the needless shock value.

See above.  

[Uttamattamakin]

5 hours ago, Quackers101 said:

when posted before, but now has anything really changed?

This is based on a scientific paper that was just published today.  You may be thinking of holographic storages that were spoken of oh over a decade ago.  This is not the same thing.  Though it would addres the same need.  

5 hours ago, Quackers101 said:

kind of fun ideas hopefully we can see some fun DVD like storage and multi level/layer possibilities.

I hope so too.  I mean with all the video people are taking alone.  

Think about this.  One set of researchers claim the brain stores about a Petabyte.  https://www.livescience.com/53751-brain-could-store-internet.html 

 

Imagine if you could somehow read and store everything a person remembers.  Cyberpunk 2077 style.   I'd make a few copies of myself so my descendants and relatives and posterity could know my mind. 

[dilpickle]

They've been making prototypes like this for literally decades. Its never going to come to market.