A 1 Petabit DVD-like disc has been created

[StDragon]

Archival optical media is available right now for the general consumer. It's called M-DISK, and you can buy the blanks on Amazon.com and the like. You can get a 5 pack of 100GB BDXL disks for over $92: with tax that's about $20 per 100GB disk. Not cheap, but it's the real thing in terms of never worrying about bit-rot of the media.

For external USB drives that burn BDXL M-DISKS, you can get a Pioneer BDR-XD08UMB-S currently listed at $134.

[williamcll]

Aren't there tapes that can hold just as much?

[wanderingfool2]

3 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

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. 

...

...

Honestly you are going with that line?  If you don't understand something it's okay to say so instead of trying to make things to fit your narrative.  As I said, the tool you used wasn't wrong earlier; your understanding of the metrics was wrong.

 

I agree with @PocketNerd using bit's instead of bytes seems misleading as most people don't know the difference between a bit and a byte, and will confuse the two.

 

To reference what you said regarding bits are bits and bytes can be 1000 or 1024, that's just so wrong in so many ways; and your whole 1024 a MB is just so wrong as a statement.

 

So here is a bit of a breakdown (pun intended)

1 byte = 1 bit.

B = Byte and b = bit (although not always followed, but it's the general convention).

You have the standard SI metric prefixes used in it

Kilo = 10³

Mega = 10⁶

Giga = 10⁹

Tera = 10¹²

Now in it's beginnings, using powers of 2 was more beneficial in terms of calculations etc...so they used

Kilo = 2¹⁰

Mega = 2²⁰

Giga = 2³⁰

Tera = 2⁴⁰

 

Or rather those prefixes were often intermixed, so the prefix is where you end up getting 1000 vs 1024 issues, which is why it doesn't matter if it's Mb or MB...both have the ambiguity in terms of calculations.  Using bits instead of bytes does absolutely nothing to resolve the confusion, it's the use of a prefix.

 

What does cause the confusion though is using bits, and mixing in bytes with different prefixes because again most people are used to seeing bytes and don't understand the proper difference in switching between units; including yourself.

 

4 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

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. 

That's just living in a fantasy land though.  This has no practical purpose for the home user in even the distant future.

 

Everyone is already more than happy with streaming (otherwise again, Blu-ray wouldn't be dying breed) because Blu-ray is already way better.  Physical media is dying because it's less convenient and no one cares if you lose a bit of quality.

 

4k to 8k will likely be one of the final pushes as well, as beyond 8k (except for VR stuff) really has a density to large that it's not really noticeable.  Even if you assumed AI became better and could run realtime on media players, it would still apply to downloads rather than physical media...because it's the simple diminishing returns.  AI can remove compression artifacts a lot better anyways.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, williamcll said:

Aren't there tapes that can hold just as much?

Not as much as this no, not ones actually being produced and used anyway.

[LAwLz]

4 hours ago, dilpickle said:

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

That's what I was thinking too.

 

HVD was a similar thing that was talked about back in 2004. It talked about ~4TB capacities at a time when 300GB hard drives were considered massive and cost the equivalent of ~330 USD.

 

 

It would be neat to have super high-density storage like this, which preferably couldn't be changed once written. But outside of some very niche use cases, I don't think there is much point in having it. Certainly not something that even 1% of forum users would use.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

It would be neat to have super high-density storage like this, which preferably couldn't be changed once written. But outside of some very niche use cases, I don't think there is much point in having it. Certainly not something that even 1% of forum users would use.

It would be nice instead of LTO tape so long as write speed is good and you can have multiple drives to write discs at once (assuming smaller capacity options will exist). LTO tape actually take up a lot of physical space and do need some level of care if you want to keep the media readable for longer than 5 years.

 

Optical media has always been just not quite the right fit as an alternative to LTO for ages, it's almost but not really. Capacity and standardized scaling (hard to store blank media and write it) just haven't been there.

 

I can't go to HPE and buy a Blu-ray backup library, I can for LTO. Optical media is worthless until that happens, for large scale backup/archive.

[LAwLz]

21 minutes ago, leadeater said:

It would be nice instead of LTO tape so long as write speed is good and you can have multiple drives to write discs at once (assuming smaller capacity options will exist). LTO tape actually take up a lot of physical space and do need some level of care if you want to keep the media readable for longer than 5 years.

 

Optical media has always been just not quite the right fit as an alternative to LTO for ages, it's almost but not really. Capacity and standardized scaling (hard to store blank media and write it) just haven't been there.

 

I can't go to HPE and buy a Blu-ray backup library, I can for LTO. Optical media is worthless until that happens, for large scale backup/archive.

I guess that also depends on how long you want to store things for. 

We have a customer that wants backups for just 2 years, but one of the requirements is that it's immutable and can be stored in a vault. They want it as disaster recovery.

They are looking at tape right now but this could potentially be a solution, if it ever comes out, is cheaper than tape, has decent speeds and could survive for those years.

[starsmine]

8 hours ago, StDragon said:

Archival optical media is available right now for the general consumer. It's called M-DISK, and you can buy the blanks on Amazon.com and the like. You can get a 5 pack of 100GB BDXL disks for over $92: with tax that's about $20 per 100GB disk. Not cheap, but it's the real thing in terms of never worrying about bit-rot of the media.

For external USB drives that burn BDXL M-DISKS, you can get a Pioneer BDR-XD08UMB-S currently listed at $134.

Its honestly that expensive because people don't know it exists so the market is small. A lot of people still think cloud will just keep their data, or their old disks. They digitized their home videos in the early 00's and tossed the tapes and dont realize its gone.

This wont really show its head for another couple of decades when peoples grandkids are trying to learn about their grandparents lives from the 90s-2000s

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

I guess that also depends on how long you want to store things for. 

We have a customer that wants backups for just 2 years, but one of the requirements is that it's immutable and can be stored in a vault. They want it as disaster recovery.

They are looking at tape right now but this could potentially be a solution, if it ever comes out, is cheaper than tape, has decent speeds and could survive for those years.

If it's really long then LTO will still have this beat easily. LTO key is in backwards compatibility for reads so there is little concern over obtaining an LTO drive 10-50 years later that can read your tape, whereas an emerging technology has no guarantee of that at all for even a single product generation.

 

Then there are tape library systems that are full enclosed cabinets that can scale across cabinets as well which you place in your environmentally controlled rooms and the tape will last an extremely long time. But if you really care about longevity and data access you setup automatic media refreshes to read off the data and write to a new tape, same tape generation or a newer one.

 

Those that really do care about their data and keeping it in decade time scales don't write it once to a tape and then hope it lasts that long, data requires maintenance which includes refreshing the physical media it is on.

 

There is also less common IBM tape technology i.e. TS1170 which can store 50TB uncompressed and 150TB compressed and that is only going to get larger. By the time this ever gets to market, if ever, there will be real tape systems and technologies that'll probably make it pointless for these sorts of customers.

 

Odds are it's going to end up like all optical media, used for media product distribution and one off data copies/ad-hoc which it's actually great for.

[Uttamattamakin]

9 hours ago, dilpickle said:

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

True people have been trying to invent a better optical/removable drive for years.  Right now the best removable media is... IMHO... hot swappable SATA drives.  That's what I'm using for backup.  By backup I mean keeping at least one copy of everything I have on my drives and in the cloud on a drive that is not connected to anything all the time.  

Then refreshing that backup at regular intervals. 

7 hours ago, williamcll said:

Aren't there tapes that can hold just as much?

https://www.techradar.com/news/petabyte-tapes-are-on-the-horizon-but-dont-hold-your-breath

 

Yeah sort of but those would be planned peta BYTE tapes  not peta BIT.  So those tapes would hold 8x more data.   A problem with tape is access speed and writing speed.  To go to a random spot on a tape one has to play/rewind a good portion of the tape.   At least thats my foggy memory of using casette tapes back in the 80's with computers that used tape players in the role most used a Floppy disk for. 

8 hours ago, StDragon said:

Archival optical media is available right now for the general consumer. It's called M-DISK, and you can buy the blanks on Amazon.com and the like. You can get a 5 pack of 100GB BDXL disks for over $92: with tax that's about $20 per 100GB disk. Not cheap, but it's the real thing in terms of never worrying about bit-rot of the media.

For external USB drives that burn BDXL M-DISKS, you can get a Pioneer BDR-XD08UMB-S currently listed at $134.

100GB though is hardly anything now compared to the files most people have to store.  Needing 10 of those to make a copy of all the data one could store on a 1 TB OneDrive or Google Drive is a lot. 

 

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

It would be nice instead of LTO tape so long as write speed is good and you can have multiple drives to write discs at once (assuming smaller capacity options will exist). LTO tape actually take up a lot of physical space and do need some level of care if you want to keep the media readable for longer than 5 years.

This is why I keep saying the caveat which people ignore for some reason "with proper care"   I can read my old DVD's because I took some care of them.    This is true of ANY media.  There is no media in the world you can say bury in the sand for 4000 years that won't loose some information. 

 

 

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

Optical media has always been just not quite the right fit as an alternative to LTO for ages, it's almost but not really. Capacity and standardized scaling (hard to store blank media and write it) just haven't been there.

 

I can't go to HPE and buy a Blu-ray backup library, I can for LTO. Optical media is worthless until that happens, for large scale backup/archive.

 

5 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

 

Every media outlet reporting on this is using petaBIT 

 

Yes it would make more sense if we discussed it as storage and used BYTES.   

 

Conversely these days one thing most people think of for bits is the bandwidth of their internet connection.  Think about this.  If you have a gigbit fiber to the home .... how long will it take to transmit a petabit.  According to Wolfram Alpha it would take more than 11 days. 11 days of a persons life to download that under ideal conditions.  That might be better  Now as for "thats misleading and IT"  (Did you answer who or what you mean by IT) is trying to mislead us.   (I demand a short answer to that one)  Get off it.  This is an internet forum just relax. 

 

(Thankfully us IT's know how to relax since IRL no one acts like they do online.) 

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

I guess that also depends on how long you want to store things for. 

EXACTLY.  A maintained archive going back say ... 7-10 years for important legal documents can be maintained with media that has a life of at least two years if one is making those archives on a yearly basis. 

 

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

We have a customer that wants backups for just 2 years, but one of the requirements is that it's immutable and can be stored in a vault. They want it as disaster recovery.

They are looking at tape right now but this could potentially be a solution, if it ever comes out, is cheaper than tape, has decent speeds and could survive for those years.

This would be done because there are always more documents to store.  This is true even for a person.    For example in the US keeping a copy of your tax returns going back as far as you can is a good thing.  Keeping them in the cloud is not ideal because what if that gets hacked.  

It's kinda hard to hack an air gaped off line archive, on an optical disc, in a case, in a file cabinet. 

One thing I have to do is keep some kind of a copy of all student work for a couple of years just in case there is a grade dispute.  It does not need to last as long as Cuneiform to be useful.  In fact on a time scale of 10 years storing files for a given program or platform you use can be an issue if that program changes and your data is gone because it can't be decoded.   That is unless one is VERY careful about the file types used etc etc. 

[Uttamattamakin]

15 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Its honestly that expensive because people don't know it exists so the market is small. A lot of people still think cloud will just keep their data, or their old disks. They digitized their home videos in the early 00's and tossed the tapes and dont realize its gone.

This wont really show its head for another couple of decades when peoples grandkids are trying to learn about their grandparents lives from the 90s-2000s

This is true.  The same is true for the old VHS's.  People don't realize that if they want to keep that old footage it takes someone in the family spending the time to archive all of it, and maintain such an archive.   In the end the only really long lasting archives one can have are .... stones.  (As an aside buried a relative last month in the same yard as my grandfather and grandmother.  Grandpa bought grandma a stone ... but didn't provide for himself).   Even those stones don't last forever.  

 

At some point people just don't care to do it. 

 

9 minutes ago, leadeater said:

If it's really long then LTO will still have this beat easily. LTO key is in backwards compatibility for reads so there is little concern over obtaining an LTO drive 10-50 years later that can read your tape, whereas an emerging technology has no guarantee of that at all for even a single product generation.

 

Odds are it's going to end up like all optical media, used for media product distribution and one off data copies/ad-hoc which it's actually great for.

Does this come down to if one needs random access VS sequential access.  Tape classically has always been able to store more data than spinning media or drives ... but then spinning media has it beat by a mile on random access.   This is why I am thinking that there is a possible future where we use media again for distributing future possible forms of entertainment, games, and VERY interactive movies (If we can really even call them that when you can put on VR glasses and join in on the action almost holodeck style). 

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Does this come down to if one needs random access VS sequential access.  Tape classically has always been able to store more data than spinning media or drives ... but then spinning media has it beat by a mile on random access.   This is why I am thinking that there is a possible future where we use media again for distributing future possible forms of entertainment, games, and VERY interactive movies (If we can really even call them that when you can put on VR glasses and join in on the action almost holodeck style). 

For backups and archives you don't really care about random access, it's simply not a requirement. Getting data off our tapes has never been a problem. Time to seek for a tape isn't the same as the time to read or write it end to end.

 

If anything is truly going to displace Tape it's going to be cheap archive focused flash/NAND/etc. If you pack in to the size of an LTO tape even current flash technology you'll handily beat the capacity of any tape technology, it'll just be stuuuuuupidly expensive.

 

We already have archive focused SSD's, 100TB SATA/SAS: https://nimbusdata.com/products/exadrive/. But it's not really for offline data storage.

[Doobeedoo]

I find it very hard to believe we will see anything with RPM storage wise in consumer space. Stright up price is going off the charts for these and I'd just expect general SSDs to grow in capacity and internet speeds. These huge medias for consumer space aside from archival and pro space, are very slow vs their capacity. Speed needs to follow capacity at some point no. 

By this time is to exist, let alone questionable for consumer space, also price, we'll have SSDs far from it in terms of storage and speed.

[Zodiark1593]

5 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

This is true.  The same is true for the old VHS's.  People don't realize that if they want to keep that old footage it takes someone in the family spending the time to archive all of it, and maintain such an archive.   In the end the only really long lasting archives one can have are .... stones.  (As an aside buried a relative last month in the same yard as my grandfather and grandmother.  Grandpa bought grandma a stone ... but didn't provide for himself).   Even those stones don't last forever.  

 

At some point people just don't care to do it. 

 

 

Lucky for me, I don’t need my personal data to last millennia. Just need it to (barely) outlive me. After that, data preservation is no longer my problem. 
 

3 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

I find it very hard to believe we will see anything with RPM storage wise in consumer space. Stright up price is going off the charts for these and I'd just expect general SSDs to grow in capacity and internet speeds. These huge medias for consumer space aside from archival and pro space, are very slow vs their capacity. Speed needs to follow capacity at some point no. 

By this time is to exist, let alone questionable for consumer space, also price, we'll have SSDs far from it in terms of storage and speed.

Depends really. If the biggest ISPs still insist on data caps (*gives angry side-eye to Comcast), then there will probably be some sort of market for this kind of product. And in America at least, a number of places are served only by slower DSL, or satellite, rendering cloud TB backups unfeasible. 

[wanderingfool2]

4 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Conversely these days one thing most people think of for bits is the bandwidth of their internet connection.  Think about this.  If you have a gigbit fiber to the home .... how long will it take to transmit a petabit.  According to Wolfram Alpha it would take more than 11 days. 11 days of a persons life to download that under ideal conditions.  That might be better  Now as for "thats misleading and IT"  (Did you answer who or what you mean by IT) is trying to mislead us.   (I demand a short answer to that one)  Get off it.  This is an internet forum just relax. 

No need to get butthurt.  I'm just merely "stating the facts" because your posts are getting things wrong because you don't seem to understand [and you are basing your flawed understanding to try educating people; which SHOULD be corrected because this is a tech forum and having an abnormally wrong statement because you are confused SHOULD be pointed out is a wrong statement]

 

"This is an internet forum just relax" should be taken to heart by yourself honestly; it's just the internet grow up, it's just people correcting YOUR mistakes.

 

You blamed the conversion tool being wrong, when it's your failure of understanding that there might be different ways to convert.

You claim bit vs byte makes a bit difference because bits are bits and bytes can have different conversions which is wildly wrong.

You stated RAW footage instead of lossless footage, so what if I didn't tag you in it?  It doesn't matter, that isn't misleading any person who is capable of reading would realize who used the phrasing RAW instead of lossless...but since you seem so butthurt, IT was referring to RAW; because RAW is using the wrong terminology.  [And since you brought it up and you DEMANDED, while insinuating that I was demeaning you by using the word IT, then I except an apology]

 

 

It doesn't matter if it takes 11 days to download a petabit.  You are ignoring that there isn't really any practical use-case.

Let me say this again, digital downloads have worse quality than blu-ray, blu-rays ARE NOT really popular these days.  Everyone went to digital download because it's convenient.  Games aren't released like that anymore because discs were not only a hindrance but lots of times you had to still download a multi-gigabyte patch.

Size of disc means nothing to the end users, because the end user can't tell the difference between a 50GB blu-ray disc and a 5GB downloaded file.  It would take mental gymnastics to assume that it will become the next holy grail for video for the home user.

 

People don't want to get up off their couches and put in the disc.  People want to be able to click a button and just skip halfway through a movie, instead of waiting 4-5 seconds while the laser assembly head moves to position and then caches enough data.

 

The bottom line, this technology has no practical use for the vast majority of home users...and the minor few who keep servers/massive backups at their house won't mean a thing compared to any potential clients on the enterprise side (and mark my words, they would keep the pricing at a level to make the most from the enterprise side to maintain the most profits while not alienating them).

 

4 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

This is why I keep saying the caveat which people ignore for some reason "with proper care"   I can read my old DVD's because I took some care of them.    This is true of ANY media.

And you are ignoring what people like myself has said.

 

Every format has a longevity associated with it; and HDD's/SSD's are a lot more predictable than medium like DVD's.

 

It doesn't matter if you have DVD's that contain data.  Commercially made DVD's were stamped, so it's difficult to destroy.

Writable DVD's were generally dye based (or some type of metal that can get vaporized)...both of which were pretty vulnerable to other factors

Dye based ones were greatly variable, I have a box of CD's for example all burned at roughly the same time and treated...all sitting in a closet for a decade.  It's a random chance which ones work and which ones don't.  An imperfection in the way they were built could make CD rot happen even in the most optimum condition...using cheaper dyes as well or different dyes can also greatly affect longevity. [These were CD manufacturers that were saying 25 year lifespan]

 

There are multiple reasons why disc rot happens, and again NOT all of them are controllable.  Contamination I think being the biggest unknown factor (can't control what happened in the factory), debonding is a thing, general breakdown of the dye is a thing, crystal structures growing in the writing medium is a thing (although that's also part of the contamination).  Now the higher quality stuff would usually not have contamination, so those kinds of samples would last longer...but plenty didn't have that kind of quality.

 

Of course, most people when they experienced CD rot early it's because they left it out to bake in the sun which ruined the dye...but CD rot is a thing and it happens at a lot more unpredictable rate, which is why things such as LTO's I think will be the primary candidate.

 

 

 

7 hours ago, leadeater said:

It would be nice instead of LTO tape so long as write speed is good and you can have multiple drives to write discs at once (assuming smaller capacity options will exist). LTO tape actually take up a lot of physical space and do need some level of care if you want to keep the media readable for longer than 5 years.

I'd argue the level of cleanliness they will need, the discs themselves will have to be stored in a protective container to guard against dust and any other contaminants.

 

Anyways, from the bits of the paper that do exist, they are using a femtosecond laser...those things are still expensive.

 

Overall, I don't like the way this paper is stating things.  Their stats claim actually 800tb per side, but their 1 petabit headline comes from using both sides of the disc [where they state 1.6 petabits].

 

Actually, from what I've seen their claim of 1 petabits also doesn't seem to factor in error correct on the disc medium as well [rather raw bits].  While it wouldn't make a huge difference, at least if it follows the CD level of error correction (a block of 28 for data followed by 4 parity from what I can tell, could be wrong...although blu-ray due to the density actually increased the parity bits iirc)...then 800 tb per side reduces to 700 tb [or 1.4 pb for a double sided version]...but they compare their version to the Blu-ray equivalents with parity bits. [Looked it up data on blu-ray accounts for 85.2% of actual data, the rest is parity bits].

 

At least from their figures as well, it seems that heat (albeit 120C and 130C, is what they tested) will degrade the dye overtime...so it makes me wonder the read laser, will it heat up the dye locally enough to start the decay process.  While ideally it would only ever need to be read a few times, if their proposed application is to replace HDD for longer term storage then the data would be expected to be read more often than a LTO archive likely would be.

[LAwLz]

6 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

100GB though is hardly anything now compared to the files most people have to store.  Needing 10 of those to make a copy of all the data one could store on a 1 TB OneDrive or Google Drive is a lot. 

Is that true though? 

I just checked my photos library, which is one of the things I want to keep backed up in multiple places, and that's 110GB. It's 16,431 files large, and contains quite a lot of video files. Some of the video files are really large as well. For example I got a 6.3GB rip of an old VHS tape from 1993.

 

 

Each one of my newer pictures is around 3.5MB, so I could fit over 28,000 pictures on a single 100GB disc.

 

 

 

I am not so sure that people have hundreds upon hundreds of gigabytes of files that they really want to archive.

That's not to say I don't have more data. I have over 12TB of stuff stored on my NAS. But it's not like I need to make a long-term archive of my anime collection. I would reserve it for the most important stuff that can't easily be replaced.

[Uttamattamakin]

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

 

I'm not butt hurting not ignoring what you said everything you just said is reply to before you even wrote it by my statement that with Proper Storage this could be a good way to back up files.

 

It could also be a good way to distribute media that doesn't rely on the cloud those are facts.

 

I don't think you answered my question though when you said that it used the wrong terminology who were you referring to who did you just call it? 

 

9 hours ago, leadeater said:

For backups and archives you don't really care about random access, it's simply not a requirement. Getting data off our tapes has never been a problem. Time to seek for a tape isn't the same as the time to read or write it end to end.

 

If anything is truly going to displace Tape it's going to be cheap archive focused flash/NAND/etc. If you pack in to the size of an LTO tape even current flash technology you'll handily beat the capacity of any tape technology, it'll just be stuuuuuupidly expensive.

 

We already have archive focused SSD's, 100TB SATA/SAS: https://nimbusdata.com/products/exadrive/. But it's not really for offline data storage.

Interesting so you mean like ssds that don't have the bit rot problem? I suppose that could work well for having a drive you keep in your computer as redundancy for your data.

 

I don't know if the powers that be want to create and distribute really large High Fidelity movies or deeply Interactive games and other programs Maybe a disk like this would be useful but it is tough to imagine what the use would be for.

 

I  mean 64 KB is enough for everybody right

 

[Doobeedoo]

5 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Depends really. If the biggest ISPs still insist on data caps (*gives angry side-eye to Comcast), then there will probably be some sort of market for this kind of product. And in America at least, a number of places are served only by slower DSL, or satellite, rendering cloud TB backups unfeasible. 

I can't imagine data caps exist, I'm in third world country and it's not a thing at all. Slow speeds at places sure. Infrastructure needs to hurry that's for sure. But really this tech seems way far off then just expanding fiber.

[wanderingfool2]

24 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

I don't think you answered my question though when you said that it used the wrong terminology who were you referring to who did you just call it? 

Seriously, how do you not understand given I already said IT = RAW.  Because, it was just quicker to reference RAW as it; and state that it was meant as lossless.  I already specified that...so stop with this referring to a person as it; because you are getting seriously close to libeling by consistently implying the statement it referred to a person, after clearly I specified that it referred to RAW

 

28 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

It could also be a good way to distribute media that doesn't rely on the cloud those are facts.

No it's not the "facts"; because you fail to consider the use-cases.

 

 

The fact is it won't really have any purpose in consumer; only enterprise levels.  You fail to even list any actual use-case.  It's all well and good to say it would take 11 days to download this much stuff but that's an asinine baseless argument.

 

Movies aren't that big, and again we have real world examples of people not giving any care about the real quality.  You could literally stream 70 4k streams at gigabit internet streams.  Bluray is over 6x the bitrate of most streaming in 4k platforms.  The 99% of consumers don't care about the "better" quality, so what makes you think having a disc that can store so much more would.

 

Games, doesn't work.

 

So tell me, what mythical media do you think it will now use to distribute?  Because again, movies are already something people consume from digital services not physical media anymore...especially when such playback devices would cost hundreds of dollars.   This realistically only has purposes at the enterprise level.

 

There's no point in stating that "those are facts" when you approach this topic with naivety, to the point where you thought bits were the better metric because bits are bits.

 

42 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Interesting so you mean like ssds that don't have the bit rot problem? I suppose that could work well for having a drive you keep in your computer as redundancy for your data.

 

I don't know if the powers that be want to create and distribute really large High Fidelity movies or deeply Interactive games and other programs Maybe a disk like this would be useful but it is tough to imagine what the use would be for.

 

I  mean 64 KB is enough for everybody right

Again, "large high fidelity movies" is a naive statement given that again bluray is pretty much a failing medium (rarely do you find people buying them).  No one wants to grab a disc and wait for it to load just to watch a movie.  You want to know something, FFMPEG has a preset where you get the extremely high fidelity for a given space...they call it placebo.  The honest truth is, if you sit down users infront of a TV and show them a 4k Netflix stream vs a 4k blu-ray at any reasonable distance no one will be able to notice.

 

Games makes no sense either, the PS3 is a good example of having blu-ray.  If you look at metal gear solid, you  had to wait for the game to push assets to the harddrive during each major section (sucks for you if you had a game save in the middle and end and wanted to switch between them).  It was like 5 minutes of waiting.  Game also frequently get patched now as well, adding/manipulating assets.  So no, developers wouldn't make games for such a niche market of people.

 

 

The truth is, on the consumer side of things we aren't growing at nearly a rate we used to, because we effectively hit a plateau due to many factors.  ~15 years ago now I bought my first 1 TB drive, and at that time I was thinking it will last a long time but the way I consume content it wouldn't last long before I had to buy more.  I officially built my NAS with 16 TB of capacity (16 TB lost due to parity), and thought this is going to last me at least 5-6 years before I need to consider upgrading.  I'm currently not at my 16TB capacity, although I am considering upping it to 64 TB of storage...but even then at my current rate 64 TB would be filled in about a 10-15 year period.  My consumption rate in the last 5-6 years actually stayed roughly the same.

 

The general thing is, moores law is dead in terms of blanket technology perspective; it has been for a while now...and the general need for massive amounts of space didn't keep up either.  If you start at 2009, it took to 2011 to halve in price (2 years), then it took to 2015 to halve again (4 years), we are now sitting at 8 years and it's about halved again.  We have about hit the limits of what we can do with HDD's (literally the drops were because we went to things where SMR etc and things like PMR which allowed us to squeeze a bit more out).  So in another 10-16 years I can confidently say on the consumer side of things there isn't a real push for data anymore.

 

The only thing that pushes it still is games, and those won't be distributed on discs anymore because it's too costly and can't be updated. [that's why SSD's will be a more consumer thing than these discs].

 

It's just a fantasy to assume it will be a consumer level product.  This is, and always will be an enterprise driven technology IF it even becomes a thing

 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Interesting so you mean like ssds that don't have the bit rot problem? I suppose that could work well for having a drive you keep in your computer as redundancy for your data.

Yea or are stored in powered slot carriers to keep the cells refreshed, probably the first though. But it wouldn't be difficult to treat archive SSDs exactly the same as LTO tapes. Robot arm to pick them from media slot and put it in to a SATA/SAS drive slot to write it and then put it back.

[Godlygamer23]

On 2/21/2024 at 3:03 PM, wanderingfool2 said:

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.

If a RAM manufacturer is representing GiB as GB, then it's wrong, and I say the same thing about Windows as well. Represent it for what it actually is - if there are additional units that are available to define what you're talking about...then fucking use them. There's no excuse except for companies that refuse to change. 

 

Microsoft clearly acknowledges the difference between GiB and GB, and units of similar caliber(KiB and KB for example) because it's in the default Windows calculator, and yet Windows is representing storage space in binary vs decimal. It doesn't even need to change anything - just change how the unit is being represented, and users will probably figure it out. 

 

This is a debate that shouldn't even be a debate.

[Godlygamer23]

13 hours ago, starsmine said:

Its honestly that expensive because people don't know it exists so the market is small. A lot of people still think cloud will just keep their data, or their old disks. They digitized their home videos in the early 00's and tossed the tapes and dont realize its gone.

This wont really show its head for another couple of decades when peoples grandkids are trying to learn about their grandparents lives from the 90s-2000s

People bought into the marketing of cloud storage, and while it's convenient, you have no control over how your data is stored, and what is being done with it, and there's the whole 'requiring an internet connection to access data' situation. If you want your data to be accessed offline, and available for decades to come, using properly archiving media is the only way to do it, and if your data is sensitive, then you need to encrypt it before writing it to the disc. 

 

Hard drives are useful, but they have a fairly limited lifespan, so media with long lifespans are a requirement for data that people want to store for decades, and they would need to maintain means of getting access to that data as well.

[Zodiark1593]

2 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

I can't imagine data caps exist, I'm in third world country and it's not a thing at all. Slow speeds at places sure. Infrastructure needs to hurry that's for sure. But really this tech seems way far off then just expanding fiber.

Comcast is at about 1.2 TB per month. Most satellite providers, Starlink aside perhaps, are only 100-200GB of “Priority Data”. 

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

I can't imagine data caps exist, I'm in third world country and it's not a thing at all. Slow speeds at places sure. Infrastructure needs to hurry that's for sure. But really this tech seems way far off then just expanding fiber.

Just remember the internet isn't tied to economic status of the country or the "physical world", economic super powers can have hilariously terrible internet access and internet access equality. 

 

But also yea here all we really have is "fair use" which is not specifically defined. Just don't be a problem and you can use as much as you like.

[Uttamattamakin]

44 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Hard drives are useful, but they have a fairly limited lifespan, so media with long lifespans are a requirement for data that people want to store for decades, and they would need to maintain means of getting access to that data as well.

This I agree with.  I mean.  Copies of say my own scientific data, or data I used to write my masters thesis I want to keep not just published online but to have my own copy of such things just in case.  Tax and credit related documents which can be used to find out everything about a person should probably not be in the cloud either. YET there should be some form of a persistent copy of them that will survive the loss of a computer.  That's where media like what is described here could, at some point play a role.  COULD... at some point. 

 

8 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Just remember the internet isn't tied to economic status of the country or the "physical world", economic super powers can have hilariously terrible internet access and internet access equality. 

So true.  For the longest time in Chicagoland  ... in the middle of the USA  it was impossible to get a fiber internet connection in certain zipcodes.  This was not because the fiber wasn't there ... it just wasn't offered.  Instead we got a fiber to the neighborhood or fiber to the curb implementation.  Where DSL was used for the last little bit.   In fact in parts of this little suburb o mine that is still the case.  One either gets that or a cable internet service.  

Meanwhile miles further from the center of all the switching gear and infrastructure in a more wealthy area they get all of that.  Even if the fiber passes our houses.  

 

On the flip side we had cable before anyone here.  So, we had our MTV when Video killed the Radio star.   Kinda makes the internet over that same cable network suck.   Things are better now, and Google fiber is coming to Chicago finally.   Well you know parts of Chicago.

 

Now imagine streaming some sort of immersive photorealistic VR experience over that infrastructure.  That'll never work. 

 

59 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

 

This is a debate that shouldn't even be a debate.

This I agree with and @wanderingfool2  you are missing the point.  It taking over 120 what would be VERY large current year SSD's or HDD's to fill up one of these disc is the point.  If it's Gib or GB or whatever.   The issue is what having a "sneakernet" that can carry that much data will enable.   When you can put 100 of these into a box and FedEx them to someone why bother with a cloud for that transfer?  

If anything the existence of such a media might shake things up.  You know we are getting into a very 720k is enough for anyone phase of computing again.  So many devices have 1 TB as the limit for their storage.  If disc like this threaten to take business that might change.   Even if they do only that that would be a game changer.