These articles pop up every few years, and it always makes me shake my head. Such storage solves no market need. Technology hardly lasts five years let alone fi

These articles pop up every few years, and it always makes me shake my head. Such storage solves no market need. Technology hardly lasts five years let alone fifty years let alone five billion years. Virtually nobody is worried about being able to read their media 500 years out. And even if that was a reason to pursue a technology, the actual storage capacity is meaningless on its own. 360TB of spinning disks isn't very expensive to buy, rack, or run. And you can read and write to them at a decent clip. Managing failures is fairly predictable. What benefit does a magical glass (or, in previous incarnations, quartz or other crystal) disk have? Optical media isn't known for its amazing random access speeds. Write-once media has very limited use and is almost never fast to write to. So who's buying this? Who has data that needs to last that long, or needs to store lots of permanently immutable data that's read back sequentially? I honestly can't think of a market for this. The article says "museums" but I don't know of any museums that would prefer glass disks for their backups over an S3 bucket. This is "on prem backup" taken to a comical extreme. I can see the academic value of exploring the technology, but this space has been exhausted many times over. I remember seeing similar articles in Technology Review and Scientific American about identical developments twenty years ago. It's just not a good idea.