this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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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

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[–] [email protected] 96 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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."

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 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.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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 :(

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 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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[–] [email protected] 52 points 9 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (11 children)

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 human will not be carrying it.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago

then a Han Wo to be carrying it.

Who dat

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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.

I'd love to see cheaper enterprise storage since it'll be easier to justify more backups. That single IT guy managing a hospital network could use a break...

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 51 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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

Edit: Looking through their presentation PDF, they refer to access times from 10 seconds to 90 seconds. That's whole seconds, no milli, micro, or nano. More a substitute for archival tapes than hard drives or SSDs. They don't seem to address any use case besides cold storage. I'm not saying that to dismiss or criticize the tech, just to point out that the linked article seems to be off target in its analysis, particularly in the headline.

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[–] onlinepersona 35 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Wow, more amazing technology I can't wait to never hear about again...

[–] onlinepersona 17 points 9 months ago (5 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Finally something that could hold my entire porn collection.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (8 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Interesting.

How many write-erase cycles can be done?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 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.

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

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

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

Still useful as archive storage I guess.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (8 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (8 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Call of Duty updates

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

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

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