The wet dream of all the people who pirate. This and crystal storage.
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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Does it even matter when companies have dumped physical copies for streaming?
It would make physical sharing of data a lot more efficient instead of the old stack of floppy disks we carried around in the old days.
This is more for bulk data storage than home media.
Unless it somehow has longer shelf-life than tape storage, I think tape storage still wins.
Yeah, that's a lingering question. Article doesn't mention it, and the linked research paper is to a broken link. Also possible that hasn't been determined yet.
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I’m already ready to buy the 32K ultra extended directors cut of the LOTR with this news.
Let me guess, you'll watch it on your 720p TV? /s
Give him credit, it's 900p
Lets meet halfway and say 900i
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If they could make a R/W version of that, holy crap.
If those turn up at any sort of reasonable cost, it would simplify my home backups so much. I only have about 14TB currently on my NAS (including workstation backups) but even at that size backups are a problem. The irreplaceable stuff (about 3TB worth) is backed up in the cloud. My ripped DVDs/BRDs would all have to be reripped, other stuff I'd just have to find again or live without. I've been looking at the advancements being made in tape drives, but those are all priced for business.
I honestly can't think of a commercial application for storing that much data to disseminate outside an industrial use. Well I mean in a few years I guess video games will get that big, but other than that...
8k stereoscopic immersive feature length video is probably going to be a thing some day soon. Well... somebody will try it
Wouldn’t Backblaze be a solution for you?
Possibly. I honestly haven't looked at the ecosystem in a few years. Back then BB's plan structures would have forced me into their business solution and bill over $800/yr - more than 8x my current backup costs.
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Research is one thing, getting from concept to production is another. There was a lot of hype about holographic disc formats years ago that was promising capacities from 100 GB to several TBs but they never actually made it to the market.
With the ongoing "death" of physical media playing out in the consumer space, it will also probably be hard for these esoteric disc formats to attract the investment needed to develop them. There might be some enterprise interest if the tech is stable enough for archival use I suppose.
I could see it easily replacing tape libraries as backup devices in data centers. Without the economies of scale like we saw with DVD-RW, I doubt I'd be able to afford one until they hit the secondhand market. It would also be interesting to see something like that integrated into storage appliances which would let you have something approaching an on-prem version of Amazon's Glacier tier.
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It's "only" 125 TB. Still a lot, and impressive. But I just hate the stupid click baity 'petabit' term. We use bytes GB and TB as a standard, just use the standard term it's impressive enough.
Gigabytes, or gibibyte? Yes gibibyte is a thing.
As much as i hate to say it, but due to marketting fuckery the usage of byte has ruined it all as a 2TB drive is not 2 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 8 bits but instead 2 terabit ( 2*1000000000 )
Then comes the discussion if "1KB" is 1024 bytes or if 1000 bytes is a kilobyte. If you ask me, 1KB is 1024 bytes. If you ask the people using the kibibytes system, 1KB is 1000 bytes...
Shits fucking complex and fucked up. Cant go wrong if you say it in bits though
"gigibyte" is not a thing, but "gibibyte" is.
Gigibytes are what Gigi stores on her CDs.
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I like to express my storage sizes in nibs. I think that makes this a 250 teranib disk.
Agreed. Bits are used more commonly when talking about transfer speeds, and bytes regarding storage.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Yes this is right. There may be confusion happening with binary and metric prefixes.
For example:
Kibbibyte (1024 bytes) vs Kilobyte (1000 bytes).
Pb is still a standard measurement. While it's not very standard to use petabit instead of TB for data storage, it's still a recognized unit.
Yeah "standard" was a poorly chosen word. I meant common, as bytes are much more commonly used for disk storage.
Petabit/byte is not a buzz word.
We use bits, megabits, terabits, and petabits fairly standardly in tech.
That's not to be confused with bytes, megabytes, terabytes, and petabytes. Server farms will contain Petabytes (PB) of data.
Technically there's also exabit/byte, zettabit/byte, and yottabit/byte as we continue to climb the chain of technical capabilities. It's estimated that the internet overall has nearly 200 Zettabytes(ZB) of information in 2024.
I will refrain from using the word "standard", but when it comes to data storage the most common terminology is in bytes, as I said TB(terabytes), GB, etc. Saying Pb(petabits) isn't as common and gimmicky imo when referring to a new disk storage technology. 125 TB is impressive enough without having to throw the Peta in there.
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But then the headline would have to say "Scientists Develop Optical Disc with measly 125TB's of Storage"
Exclamation marks usually help .... and comic sans
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The longer I live the more it feels like I'm living in the startrek timeline
Keep in mind that that timeline predicts World War III in 2026. It gets very bad for a long time before it gets better.
The Eugenics War ran from 1992 to 1996, so I think we're probably okay.
Timeline was altered. They are now set to occur between 2022 and 2056.
(No, I had nothing to do with it...😋)
Yeah, in a very odd and confusing episode of SNW, they retcon the bananas out of it. And I particularly dislike that they made me feel bad for KiddieKhan, annoyer of Kirk, wielder of ear eels, and creator of world.
Oh, and in the background shot of 2022 Toronto, I definitely saw a squirrel there. So I called you on your bullshit. You’re actually Wesley crusher, traveler, and squirrel-shaped shapedshifter. J’accuse!
It's currently 2024, so we're still okay. :)
Keep an eye out for sanctuary districts, 
Maybe.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Researchers from Scientists from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology just figured out how to fit up to a petabit of data onto an optical disk by storing information in 3D.
Well, you can kiss those puny disks goodbye thanks to a new technique that can read and write up to 100 layers of data in the space of just 54-nanometres, as described in a new paper published in the journal Nature.
“This could greatly reduce the footprint as well as the energy consumption of the future big data centers, providing a sustainable solution for the digital economy,” said Min Gu, a professor at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, and one of the paper’s co-authors.
The technique required the researchers to develop a brand new material, which has the easy-to-remember name dye-doped photoresist with aggregation-induced emission luminogens, or AIE-DDPR if you’re in a hurry.
AIE-DDPR is a highly uniform and transparent film that lets researchers blast it with lasers at the nanoparticle scale with precision, allowing for an unprecedented storage method.
Shrinking the size and scale of data storage could have huge implications, not just for the business of the internet but also for the environmental footprint of the tech industry.
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