Video of ceramic storage system prototype surfaces online — 10,000TB cartridges bombarded with laser rays could become mainstream by 2030, making slow hard drives and tapes obsolete::Ceramics-based storage medium consumes very little energy and lasts more than 5,000 years, creators say
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.”
Finally something that could hold my entire porn collection.
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.
Much to my frustration. Backing up a self-hosted NAS to 3-2-1 standards is difficult and/or expensive. I wish LTO drives weren’t out of reach.
Wow, more amazing technology I can’t wait to never hear about again…
Ceramic, making clay pots and space travel possible since the dawn of civilization. .😎🔥💯
Likely not that ceramic. Ceramic has a pretty loose definition, see: “ceramic cookware”
shun the non ceramic believer! boo. but in serious, you are right, it is however kinda boss that ceramic is still a key component.
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.
Now if they could only make one that only costs a couple thousand dollars and fits in a full height 5.25" drive bay.
Why would you want that? This is, permanent storage. You write to it and that’s it, it’ll hold the data, and only that data, forever.
This method of data storage will not be useful to the average consumer, and this company is hoping to replace hard drives in data centers for cold storage.
You had tricks on cd’s and such to make it kinda work as read/write storage.
Yeah, but this ceramic storage is literally lasers punching holes into a ceramic layer.
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.
Still useful as archive storage I guess.
For some use cases, sure. Personally I can’t remember when was the last time I reached for old backups to dig something up.
Then a court comes and orders some deletion … :-)
Removal is probably possible by just burning trash over real data. But identifying what needs to be burned. Ouch.
I can understand needing this tech for court records and similar stuff. Even for libraries which desire to store everything in the world. But that’s about it. I don’t think many people go to old backups and see their old documents or code they wrote. Photos, sure, but even that is not a frequent thing.
Business have plenty of reason to use this. Backing up several terabytes in a proper 3-2-1 setup is expensive.
Data hoarders will love it if it’s cheaper than current storage methods. How much would you need to pay for 10PB right now?
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.
“Any time soon” is the thing. Look at the history of hard disk drives. To store 3.75MB in 1957 on a hard disk, a single hard disk was the size of two refrigerators. By the 1980s they were 8 inches (~20cm) big stored 10 MB. Nowadays they are 3.5 inches (~9 cm) big and can store multiple TB.
Technology has accelerated considerably. Even if it takes 20 years, it might still be quicker than the hard disk to home timeline.
Yes, but there’s different problems at hand now. 60 years ago the entire driving force in computers consisted of making things smaller. A hard drive 50 years ago worked like a hard drive from 20 years ago. Just shrunk. Same for processors.
Well now we’re running out of room to shrink. We had to change hard drives completely. Processors started going multi core, and in the case of these ceramic drives: lasers can’t get much smaller and stay powerful enough to write, and magnifying lenses also can’t keep shrinking.
Aside from that, this tech is all physical, which means noise, and no one wants to go back to hearing noisy hard drives again. Lol
Thermal variations over time: Hold my beer.
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.
Would be huge for Bitcoin. We could x1000 the number of transactions per second
