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230 KB/s write. Talk about atrocious.
How about cost? There are already 100TB SSDs for about $40,000 each.(Yes those cost a lot more per TB than normal SSDs but the data center space cost savings is huge over normal SSDs. It's not consumer grade hardware)

What kind of write speeds does this tech offer?
 
husker said:
So you think Tom's readers would be served well by simply ignoring the topics of things like, oh I don't know, the next generation of graphics cards and CPUs until after they are available on Newegg? Now that's really something "I can't buy".
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You can clearly buy the latest and greatest in one way or the other, but your wallet is saying no.
These research discoveries are pointless and you know it.
 
targetdrone said:
There are already 100TB SSDs
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But SSDs lose their data after several years unless they are powered on, continually renewing the data.

Magnetic hard drives and tapes can eventually lose their data too. An errant magnetic field and bam, your data are gone.

This technology is meant as an extremely long-lived archival storage that is resistant to degradation and data loss. A magnetic field won't wipe out data that is carved into glass (so to speak).
 
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targetdrone said:
230 KB/s write. Talk about atrocious.
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It may be slow but this is for cold storage, data you no longer need but still want to or must keep around just in case. I can imagine those being really handy for engineers, lawyers, medical staff and other professions where people need to keep permanent records of everything to cover their asses and randomly discovering some number of years after the fact that the data has rotten away isn't an option.
 
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InvalidError said:
It may be slow but this is for cold storage, data you no longer need but still want to or must keep around just in case. I can imagine those being really handy for engineers, lawyers, medical staff and other professions where people need to keep permanent records of everything to cover their asses and randomly discovering some number of years after the fact that the data has rotten away isn't an option.
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230KB/s write speed is the speed of a "fast" 3.5" floppy disk. It would take 74 years to fill the 500TB drive proposed in this article. That's not a usable product.
 
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spongiemaster said:
230KB/s write speed is the speed of a "fast" 3.5" floppy disk. It would take 74 years to fill the 500TB drive proposed in this article. That's not a usable product.
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It is 230KB/s PER LASER.

The article said extra lasers can be added to get the write time down to about 60 days. That would be about 96MB/s.

I generate maybe 100GB/.year worth of important data that might be worth backing up on that sort of device, I'd be fine with 1MB/s for permanent backups. Write everything in triplicate across different physical quadrants of the device for redundancy since I'm unlikely to fill 500TB in my lifetime.
 
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spongiemaster said:
230KB/s write speed is the speed of a "fast" 3.5" floppy disk. It would take 74 years to fill the 500TB drive proposed in this article. That's not a usable product.
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No one is saying its currently a usable product, doesn't mean it isnt neat and that it wouldnt have some awesome cold storage applications. Is it really hard for some people to see the potentials and long term applications for something before its a finished product? Now the bigger issue is that sure that disk can last basically forever, what about the reader? It would be a useless artifact without something that can read it. I remember hearing about another long term storage possibility for documents that was basically printing them with a laser in micro size onto stone or silica, the only thing that would be required for reading them is a magnifying glass or microscope depending on the density
 
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peachpuff said:
You can clearly buy the latest and greatest in one way or the other, but your wallet is saying no.
These research discoveries are pointless and you know it.
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No they most certainly are not. They are exactly the entire point of this site. You can't go out and buy RDNA 3 cards right now but Toms will tell you all about them before they come out. I'm literally baffled by your dismissiveness regarding new tech research.
 
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Personally I don't want anything with moving parts; the reader/writer technology here would seem to be pretty extreme.

By the way, the last paragraph refers to "Zhang's team". Who is Zhang?
 
mikewinddale said:
But SSDs lose their data after several years unless they are powered on, continually renewing the data.

Magnetic hard drives and tapes can eventually lose their data too. An errant magnetic field and bam, your data are gone.

This technology is meant as an extremely long-lived archival storage that is resistant to degradation and data loss. A magnetic field won't wipe out data that is carved into glass (so to speak).
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I can remember when they said CD's would last a long time, I wonder how long before this new tech will also be found to also degrade over time.
 
thisisaname said:
I can remember when they said CD's would last a long time, I wonder how long before this new tech will also be found to also degrade over time.
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The main cause of failure for CDs and DVDs is delamination letting moisture into the recording layers from the edges and scratches on the label (thin) side where the actual recording media is.

With careful handling and storage under office-like conditions, CDs and DVDs in good physical condition do last a very long time.
 
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Definitely has uses in space to replace gold. If they get up to that speed of 500TB in 60 days they could backup the entirety of human knowledge and history and put it on the moon in just a few months, not to mention put it on another Voyager craft to send into the cosmos with just a small gold disk with the instructions on how to build a reader.

Data centers, museums, and the other uses mentioned I can see as well since they need cold storage, but the question is what are read speeds like?
 
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InvalidError said:
I generate maybe 100GB/.year worth of important data that might be worth backing up on that sort of device, I'd be fine with 1MB/s for permanent backups. Write everything in triplicate across different physical quadrants of the device for redundancy since I'm unlikely to fill 500TB in my lifetime.
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If a product based on this technology ever comes out, we're looking at a decade or more out. Who knows what storage demands will look like then. If it ever does reach commercialization, it isn't going to be targeted at you or I out of the gate, so who cares what you think your needs will be in relation to this.
 
artk2219 said:
No one is saying its currently a usable product, doesn't mean it isnt neat and that it wouldnt have some awesome cold storage applications. Is it really hard for some people to see the potentials and long term applications for something before its a finished product? Now the bigger issue is that sure that disk can last basically forever, what about the reader? It would be a useless artifact without something that can read it. I remember hearing about another long term storage possibility for documents that was basically printing them with a laser in micro size onto stone or silica, the only thing that would be required for reading them is a magnifying glass or microscope depending on the density
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The original Winchester hard drive design is from the early 70's. Despite many "revolutionary" storage techniques that have been demoed over the years, nothing has ever come of any of them and the good old platter drives are still ubiquitous today with no end in sight. Flash memory has its roots from the early 80's. It took until the last decade for them to become viable mass storage devices, and they still aren't practical for truly mass storage which is why platter drives are still a thing. In the enterprise, tape is still commonly used for archival storage. When it comes to critical data storage, trust is everything, and the tape medium has proved itself.

If this new storage technique takes 30-40 years to become commercially viable, there's a good change I won't even be alive to see it, so I am not at all excited about this technology at this incredibly early stage of development.
 
The issue with this technology is that it's write-once, which makes it impractical for any home use. Even if you use it like a SSD with a 500TBW lifespan, and in home use applications where speed is limited by another factor, such as a NAS, there's no advantage over spinning mechanical storage because it's never going to be able to be commercialized to the point where it is nearly as affordable or make any sense to keep that much data on site vs offsite in a "secured" cold storage facility.

Heck, for home users and even professional users there aren't many cases where currently available 18TB drives in 2, 4, and 8 bay NASs are insufficient, and they are relatively affordable.
 
Alvar "Miles" Udell said:
The issue with this technology is that it's write-once, which makes it impractical for any home use.
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WORM media is great for home use: if your computer/NAS ever gets infected by ransomware, all of the data already written to this thing would still be intact, you just need to roll back the file system index to the point before the ransomware tried to rewrite everything similar to how you can roll back multi-session CD/DVD/BD-R discs by selecting a different session in the stack.
 
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peachpuff said:
You can clearly buy the latest and greatest in one way or the other, but your wallet is saying no.
These research discoveries are pointless and you know it.
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...Y'know, cave painting was not all that long ago the latest and greatest. Pretty proven to last all of hundreds tens of thousands of years, too.

I wonder what would have been the case, had more from those days held research and discoveries - even if exploratory and prototypical like this one - in that same regard as you evidently do.

spongiemaster said:
The original Winchester hard drive design is from the early 70's. Despite many "revolutionary" storage techniques that have been demoed over the years, nothing has ever come of any of them and the good old platter drives are still ubiquitous today with no end in sight. Flash memory has its roots from the early 80's. It took until the last decade for them to become viable mass storage devices, and they still aren't practical for truly mass storage which is why platter drives are still a thing. In the enterprise, tape is still commonly used for archival storage. When it comes to critical data storage, trust is everything, and the tape medium has proved itself.

If this new storage technique takes 30-40 years to become commercially viable, there's a good change I won't even be alive to see it, so I am not at all excited about this technology at this incredibly early stage of development.
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But some did. Giant Magnetoresistance which drove the growth of per-drive capacity from MB-range to TB-range over some 20 years, for one - It doesn't have to be different, if it works.

AFAIK Both platter-drive and SSD are running into similar limits too: It's not easy to make representations of individual bits smaller on a 2D plane than they already do, and you could only fit so many platters into a HDD, so many V-NAND layers into a flash chip, and so many different cell charge states and hope to read them back out from the same.

This one's somewhat different, at least.
 
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peachpuff said:
You can clearly buy the latest and greatest in one way or the other, but your wallet is saying no.
These research discoveries are pointless and you know it.
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I can't agree with anything you have said. I have been a reader of Tom's since 1999 and I love this type of article.
 
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