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Meet the Super DVD: Scientists Develop Massive 1 Petabit Optical Disk (gizmodo.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

94 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Note: Unfortunately the research paper linked in the article is a dead/broken/wrong link. Perhaps the author will update it later.

From the limited coverage, it doesn't sound like there's an actual optical drive that utilizes this yet and that it's just theoretical based on the properties of the material the researchers developed.

I'm not holding my breath, but I would absolutely love to be able to back up my storage system to a single optical disc (even if tens of TBs go unused).

If they could make a R/W version of that, holy crap.

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Bits are probably more useful when talking about specialized storage. Byte usually means 8 bits, but doesn't always need to, and not all data is stored in byte chunks.

A bit is the smallest piece of usable datum, so that makes sense when discussing this technology.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Sorry to be that guy, but in this context byte is strictly defined as 8 bits, never anything else. It's a strict definition in digital.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

While I strongly agree with the idea behind your comment and gave you an upvote, at the physical layer it's not strictly true - especially for optical discs. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-to-fourteen_modulation for example.

That said, capacity listings should always be the capacity of the data that can be stored and retrieved as seen by the user, and that data would be in 8-bit bytes.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

That’s not true either. Byte can be both powers of 10 and powers of 2. When talking about storage devices like hard drives etc. we usually refer to them in powers of 10, but OS’s usually do it in powers of 2. That’s why your hard drive looks smaller than advertised.

Bits are used for flash memory as individual chips. Assembled devices such as RAM and memory cards are advertised in bytes. I’m imagining that the same goes for hard drive platters and possibly disc media as well.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

A byte in this context always means 8 bit though, it has nothing to do with powers of 10 or 2. The prefix of K (kilo), M (mega), G (giga) or Ki (kibi), Mi (mebi), Gi (gibi) doesn't change the meaning of "byte".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Yes this is right. There may be confusion happening with binary and metric prefixes.

For example:

Kibbibyte (1024 bytes) vs Kilobyte (1000 bytes).