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

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• Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.”

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  • anti_antidote@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Look if you can trade a little over a hundred isolinear processing chips for a goddamn space cannon it’s gotta be worth it

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  • lolcatnip@reddthat.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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• seaQueue@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Brokkr@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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 Han Wo to be carrying it.

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    • StereoTrespasser@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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    • kamiheku@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      then a Han Wo to be carrying it.

      Who dat

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    • DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

      Pharma has entered the chat…you’ll have warehouse people riding forklifts with pallets worth much more than $1M.

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    • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      possible to make glass and ceramics that are resistant to shattering from fair hard impacts.

      As far as I know, there is 1 storage technology that has survived wars. Paper.

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    • realitista@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Or just put the cartridge in a shockproof box. One that can last as long as the medium. It can’t be that hard to make a really good box.

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  • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s… literally always a concern. Name a digital storage medium impervious to impact damage. You can’t.

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  • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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  • Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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  • jws_shadotak@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    But ceramic plates can probably be put into a working enclosure to get the data from it again

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    • aeronmelon@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Just like how if you put a shattered CD in an apparatus, you can still use a laser reader to recover any data on the undamaged sections.

      Though, because data is recorded in a circular pattern at high speeds, you won’t get much. Or what you get will have lots of corruption. I wonder what pattern of storage these plates use? If it’s similar to SSDs, then large files can be nested in a very small area of space - increasing the chances of recovery.

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  • Tattorack@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They have a video on their channel showing them bending and twisting the material.

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• sndrtj@feddit.nl ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • DrMango@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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 :(

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    • Zoboomafoo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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

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  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah genomics research has this white elephant problem where the data retention for open science/publication is incredibly expensive for the ones doing the research.

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• GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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: 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. storagedeveloper.org/events/agenda/session/527

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  • realitista@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This should be the top comment.

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• Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Wow, more amazing technology I can’t wait to never hear about again…

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  • onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Skanky@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Holographic storage has been around for about 20 years now. Where’s my holographic drive?

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• onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Data hoarders will love it if it’s cheaper than current storage methods. How much would you need to pay for 10PB right now?

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  • Bread@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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  • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      “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.

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• willya@lemmyf.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Finally something that could hold my entire porn collection.

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  • hakunawazo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Image

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• cooopsspace@infosec.pub ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I can’t wait to never be able to afford this

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  • Tattorack@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      How big were drives 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 30 years ago? Floppy disks were big for their time. They held 3.5" floppies held a whopping 1.44MB in 1986. Average new phones have capacity orders of a magnitude bigger than that.

      You might need to take a step back and look at history before making such absolute claims.

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    • douglasg14b@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Not even large data centers really in the typical sense.

      100% archival storage.

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    • capital@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I wonder how many people said that about computers back in the day when they were occupying a whole room.

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    • frezik@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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• MeaanBeaan@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • realitista@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah but in about 10 years it will be replaced by something even better and they’ll stop making the readers for it.

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

    We’re currently one Carrington Event away from losing a huge amount of the history of the last 20 years. Not to mention all of the things from previous years that were archived from originals that no longer exist.

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• Colorcodedresistor@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  [deleted]

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  • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Likely not that ceramic. Ceramic has a pretty loose definition, see: “ceramic cookware”

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• vext01@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Interesting.

  How many write-erase cycles can be done?

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  • Tattorack@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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  • MeanEYE@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    0, it’s write once read anytime you feel brave enough to dig through 10000TB of data.

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    • vext01@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Still useful as archive storage I guess.

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• MeanEYE@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • frezik@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Business have plenty of reason to use this. Backing up several terabytes in a proper 3-2-1 setup is expensive.

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    • MeanEYE@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That’s what I meant, for commercial use, sure. But not for private, ever.

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  • Bread@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You clearly have never met a data hoarder before then. Some people just store things for the heck of it and if it happens to be relevant years down the line, they have you covered.

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    • MeanEYE@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Guess I didn’t.

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  • Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Image

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• Matriks404@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I know it was said before in previous decades as storage evolved, but: How the fuck, do you eve fill these up?

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  • 6xpipe_@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s only 10 Petabytes per cartridge. The Internet Archive is currently sitting at 212 Petabytes.

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  • AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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  • Dashi@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Call of Duty updates

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  • Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I like to think of them as IPv6 addresses. You just don’t.

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  • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Porn

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  • AlijahTheMediocre@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    We’ll find a way, trust me. Its just an exuse for ever more detailed data.

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  • Evotech@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Porn

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• cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Now if they could only make one that only costs a couple thousand dollars and fits in a full height 5.25" drive bay.

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• ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I thought latency was measured in seconds for these?

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• db2@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Thermal variations over time: Hold my beer.

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• NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Then a court comes and orders some deletion … :-)

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• Mubelotix@jlai.lu ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Would be huge for Bitcoin. We could x1000 the number of transactions per second

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