Technology

Double sided disks look like this

It's larger than 6 olympic swimming pools and fits in my pants.

They have to make it as accessible a headline as possible, especially when most don't read past the headline anyway these days. The average person probably doesn't have much of an idea as to what 125TB looks like in real world use.

It would seem attractive for me 20 years ago - as in funny and colorful. A little bit like Neal Stephenson's writing in Cryptonomicon.

The problem is that various kinds of storage are something completely mundane today, and that particular thing is not going to reach us anytime soon, and BR is not too common as well.

And the initial association with optical discs for me is about scratches. Maybe if those were distributed in protective cases like with floppies, they'd live longer.

Asteroid the size of 64 Canada geese to pass Earth Tuesday - NASA

I'm not even making this up ....

Those you'd like to see naked are usually not single

Maybe without the useless campaign mode.

Lol.. my though exactly.

I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn't storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don't grow on trees, you know?

It's still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We'll see where or if they resurface next, but I'm pretty sure we're not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.

These aren't really trying to target a commercial product, at least not anyway. For now these are of interest to enterprises.

You're just sitting on your couch, trying to watch a movie, when your blu ray player suddenly begins to sound like a leaf blower, until a glowing hot disk of destruction shoots through the tray at fourty thousand rpm, ripping through your walls, decapitating your neighbor and taking down some sattelites in orbit

It would also be cool to see a comeback of those old optical disc overlay file systems that let you treat the file system on read-only media as if it was mutable.

It would certainly be a fun challenge to design a modern file system on top of append only media.

With that said, I'm very concerned about cost. It's hard to imagine this seeing mass adoption.

How great would it be to include a Case Logic binder in a safety deposit box.

That's what the article said.

Cloud storage is just someone else's computer. That someone else is who the target market for something like this is. Server farms need a lot of storage, and that takes up space. Optical storage of that capacity is great for data you need to read often, which is the vast majority of data on servers.

And also probably need to use a new reader to play the disc. It's probably gonna be expensive.

Yeah, that's going to be the thing. LTO tapes/drives would be dirt cheap if the demand was anywhere near where DVDs were at their peak

Cloud storage gets very expensive when you need to backup tens or hundreds of terabytes. You need very fast internet and you still need a local backup too. A second NAS and a tape drive will probably be cheaper than this new optical drive though.

There's no point making it last 1000 years since there won't be any working drives by then. You usually need to move data to a newer format every 15-30 years. Look how hard it is to recover data from 8" floppy disks or old tape formats now.