News Chinese researchers tout optical disk format with up to 125TB capacity

[Admin]

Researchers in China have developed a super-high capacity optical disk format which is claimed to be able to hold up to 125TB of data and hope they will be commercialized to address any upcoming data crunch.

Chinese researchers tout optical disk format with up to 125TB capacity : Read more

 

[thisisaname]

1.6 petabit (125TB) everywhere else I read about this 1.6 petabit is 200TB.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Makes a lot of sense to be able to replace tape drives for cold storage. Lower in capacity than the 500+TB tape cassettes, but having the inherent benefits of optical media.

 

[slightnitpick]

Please make a cheaper and more durable 1-layer disk using this technology. 1.25 TB is all I need to back up all of my data.

 

[Notton]

My main concern with 125TB/disc would be how long it takes to write or read data from it.

 

[slightnitpick]

My main concern with 125TB/disc would be how long it takes to write or read data from it.

I'm also concerned about the cost of the reader and writer.

 

[usertests]

1.6 petabit (125TB) everywhere else I read about this 1.6 petabit is 200TB.

They got it published in Nature:

A 3D nanoscale optical disk memory with petabit capacity
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06980-y

The title says petabit, which in my book is exactly 125 terabytes or 125 trillion bytes. If 1.6 Pb is mentioned elsewhere, such as the full text of the article, then yeah, that's 200 TB.

The claim itself is believable, other groups have been working on optical/holographic media in the 100 to 1000 terabyte range, for example "5d optical data storage". It doesn't sound like their 200-layer disc would be easy to manufacture or read, and there is likely no path for consumers to get their grubby hands on cost-effective petascale optical storage.

 

[USAFRet]

I'm also concerned about the cost of the reader and writer.

Why?
Its not a thing yet, just a format and concept.

 

[slightnitpick]

Why?
Its not a thing yet, just a format and concept.

I meant once available for sale. Large storage solutions tend to be too expensive for home use. It would be nice if this was no more expensive than a Blu-ray writer, but I doubt it given the complexity and size.

 

[usertests]

I meant once available for sale. Large storage solutions tend to be too expensive for home use. It would be nice if this was no more expensive than a Blu-ray writer, but I doubt it given the complexity and size.

They've apparently matched the size of a compact disc, but the entertainment industry is unlikely to give consumers another physical format (driving costs down). If by some miracle we do see an 8K UHD format, it will probably be between 300 GB and 1 TB, matching Archival Disc or what Folio says it can make. That one also uses a larger number of layers.

Cold storage products like Archival Disc are focused on enterprise customers. Consumers have been forced onto the SSD tech tree and the future doesn't look bright. Too bad because cheap and reliable petascale storage would be great for the amateur archivists out there.

 

[thisisaname]

They got it published in Nature:

A 3D nanoscale optical disk memory with petabit capacity
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06980-y

The title says petabit, which in my book is exactly 125 terabytes or 125 trillion bytes. If 1.6 Pb is mentioned elsewhere, such as the full text of the article, then yeah, that's 200 TB.

The claim itself is believable, other groups have been working on optical/holographic media in the 100 to 1000 terabyte range, for example "5d optical data storage". It doesn't sound like their 200-layer disc would be easy to manufacture or read, and there is likely no path for consumers to get their grubby hands on cost-effective petascale optical storage.

Given the rise in fake research that has been publish I am going wait and see.

 

[_Shatta_AD_]

With games these days approaching 1TB a copy (how many 2/4TB NVMe drives can you stick in your PC anyway), it’s a plausible solution to putting games back on removable optical media again if they could reduce the cost of such media for consumers and improve read/write speed to match at least a PCIe Gen 3 drive + ‘direct storage’ like support. Even if data on such storage may not be ReWritable. If they could produce a 20TB version at low cost, game developers could put an entire game on a single disk and simply tag new updates/DLCs/etc. to new tracks on the disk and still won’t use up one disk by the time support ends for that particular game. With high spin-speed and multiple femtosec R/W heads working in parallel on multiple tracks, they could potentially match NVMe speeds which also uses parallelism for same purpose. Reserve sector to store master tracks will act like GPT/allocation tables/registers to point to updates/modified data on new tracks basically emulating rewritable storage on a WORM media at the cost of capacity which is plentiful.
If cost can be reduced to say <$20 per game disk, it’s still more convenient than buying more external NVMe drives or keep deleting/redownloading terabytes of data on the same drives.

 

[usertests]

With games these days approaching 1TB a copy

Well that isn't really true:

Bigger Than Godzilla: Why Are Games Using So Many Gigabytes?

Do all the latest big budget games require over 100 GB of drive space? What's the average size of a AAA game today? We've investigated the figures...

www.techspot.com

Average is still about 80 GB, larger ones might be double that, 300+ GB are rare. Also, SSD $/TB is falling faster than average game sizes are rising.

We'll see greater adoption of 4/8/16 TB SSDs in the coming years, and maybe even 5 bpc (PLC) NAND to get that extra squirt of capacity.

I'd still like to see a comeback of some form of optical media if it can benefit consumers. HDDs and SSDs are far from perfect.