this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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Graphene actually is used in small amounts in a few places today. The difficulty is still in scaling up production.
I won't really know which computer storage technologies you're referring to. There are plenty of different ones, most of them just have niche applications or are too expensive to replace today's SSDs for general use, as SSD technology have gone a long way. It's a similar story to batteries, honestly. Lithium is still just the cheapest for what it does, but alternatives for niche applications exist.
Fusion needs more funding, no way around that, otherwise the theory is sound.
But of course, it is true there's tons of clickbait. But promising new developments do exist.
Before SSDs became widespread, the tech news would usually find a way to include an article about a revolutionary new storage technology that could store 100x more than a CD. Yes, that was a long time ago, and no, we didn’t hear from those technologies ever again.
100x more than a CD?
700 MB was the typical capacity of a CD. 100 times 700 MB is 70000 MB, ~70 GB.
SSDs nowadays can hold multiple TB of data, and HDDs can get even bigger in capacity 20 TB HDDs are available for consumers.
I was mainly thinking of all the countless articles I saw in various magazines in the 90s and 00s. It was pretty wild what people were thinking what storage of the future would look like. Then DVDs and higher capacity HDDs came along. In the end, they actually ended up having the capacity that the articles were speaking of. It’s just that the technology wasn’t quite so creative.
Also, we didn’t really replace the floppy disk with one of those revolutionary technologies the articles were talking about. Floppies simply died out when CD-RW and DVD-RW became good enough. Eventually those died out too when flash drives became cheap enough. There was a long list of candidates that were supposed to occupy that same space, but they just never became anything. Eventually cloud storage took over and by that it was far to late for any of those dead technologies to even try.
I recall seeing one Nokia phone that actually did have a tiny HDD inside it before flash memory became cheap enough. That could be considered one of the wild technologies that were supposed to take over the market, but never did. Turns out, CF and SD cards were so much better, so they ended up becoming the new standard. Once again, all the wild articles in the tech magazines did’t predict flash memory to dominate the market, because that just wasn’t click bait enough for the editor. Instead, wild quantum crystals and crazy experimental stuff like that was in the headlines all the time. Maybe all the incremental developments in DVDs, HDDs and flash memory just wasn’t sexy enough to write about.