- cross-posted to:
- futurology@futurology.today
- tech@pawb.social
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- futurology@futurology.today
- tech@pawb.social
- hackernews@derp.foo
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
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.
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.
What does this have to do with what I just said?
The problem isn’t how much data these can hold, but that they’re not rewritable. THAT is what makes them only useful to data centres.
You can only write to them once. But they’re not like hard disks or flash memory where you can delete the data and write again.
people also have necessities like these. family photos and videos, music and movies ripped from their physical media and ebooks can all be stored in a read only storage device.
I know my family has old photos that they’ve been trying to digitalize because of the paper slowly degrading, for example. an ordinary hard drive can fail any time. this ceramic thing could be used instead, as it appears to be more durable and there’s no need rewrite anything.
Exactly.
So what if they’re write once? If the capacity is high enough vs cost, then I just continue filling it up with incremental Backups. Knowing it’s stable and massive means I just buy a new storage medium when it’s full… In ten years.
Not even large data centers really in the typical sense.
100% archival storage.
I wonder how many people said that about computers back in the day when they were occupying a whole room.
It’s not a scale issue. But a use issue.
I don’t see many people burning disks anymore.
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.