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Cerabyte: ceramic storage poised to usher in 'yottabyte era'
- ezequiel-garzon 3y agoCompany's website: https://www.cerabyte.com https://www.cerabyte.com Abstract: https://storagedeveloper.org/events/agenda/session/527 https://storagedeveloper.org/events/agenda/session/527 - To be presented on September 18 at the Storage Developer Conference in Fremont, California.
- spandextwins 3y agoSounds like WORM (write once read many)
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoMy own usage would be satisfied with that sort of storage, and it doesn't even need to scale past single digit petabytes, I don't think. I probably even only need single digit terabytes for rewritable, everything I put on the Synology I expect to keep for decades all the way up to forever.
- taneq 3y ago640 terabytes should be enough for anyone. ;)
- lagniappe 3y agoHi Bill :)
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoRealistically, I am probably never going to have more than about 20,000 movies. Right now, I'm above 5000, but as they become more obscure and less B movies and more Z- movies, I would lose interest. Currently, I'm getting them at low bitrates, only about 3 gigs each in 265. But if I were to do them from lossless 4K bluray remux, they'd go up towards 100 gigs each, never beyond that (I think). So, x30 for the increase in quality, and x4 for for quantity. I'd probably still get the low bitrate version for streaming, but it's inconsequential to the math. I currently have about 120 terabytes capacity (maybe more if I get the Synology expansion chassis, but I think I can only do another 5 bays that way). This means that (for movies), 10 petabytes would suffice for the rest of my life, and likely for the next couple generations. Even adding television into the mix, it looks like that's currently at half what my movie collection is taking up, so 15 petabytes. Music probably isn't worth factoring in. And my 5000 ebook library, while small, is only a few gigs. If I somehow raise that to a few million, still wouldn't notice. Anything that gets me into the middle hundreds of terabytes cheaply (or with good redundancy, affordable backups) is a godsend. Your 640 terabytes thing really is good enough for me to almost within an order of magnitude.
- bee_rider 3y agoMaybe we’ll start publishing movies as 3D environments instead, so you can walk around them and see the film from any angle. I’m sure we can eat up lots of drive space with photorealistic models and textures for things that are normally hidden.
- Dylan16807 3y agoMaybe, but right now your average movie isn't even going for 4K.
- SturgeonsLaw 3y agoAlways interesting to see new ideas being tried, but if it needs an electron beam microscope to read the data back that might cause some problems for miniaturisation.
- zakary 3y ago> “Data reading can be done with equipment using high-resolution microscopic imaging techniques or electron beam microscopy.” What this says to me is it’s going to be incredibly slow to read and write. It claims in order to achieve the headline densities they will use 3nm spot sizes for writing bits, no way can that be done by optical microscope so electron beam it is. There’s a reason why we don’t use e-beams to make computer chips, it’s incredibly slow. That’s why ASML sells a $200m machine to concentrate the extreme UV mask image down to the required sized. It can do all the writing in parallel, instead of serially. I can still see this tech having use for long term archiving purposes, especially if it doesn’t end up being too expensive. But that’s a big if. Even if the ceramic storage tapes are free, running a massive high throughput electron microscope is unlikely to ever be anything close to inexpensive. My intuition is that it will probably not be able to compete with just buying some traditional HDDs or tapes and keeping backups. Maybe someone with more knowledge of the area can chime in?
- Apocryphon 3y agoThey're claiming that read/write speeds are at gigabytes per second using "low power" technologies.
- Euphorbium 3y agoThat seems insane.
- dekhn 3y agoWhy? In high throughput optics you are basically scanning one full frame of a 4K (3840x2160) per second (or higher!). If you store one bit per pixel, with 16 bit data, that's 10-20MB/sec. You would likely move the field of view to obtain 10FPS, so 200MB/sec per reader. However, it would be trivial to parallelize this (with more objectives, mirrors, higher resolution cameras or whole devices) and so it's not impossible to imagine an optimized, production version of this generating terabytes/second of raw data.
- 3y ago
- nektro 3y agohuge if true
- prologist 3y agoCeramics are notoriously brittle so it will be interesting to see how they make ceramic tapes.
- theultdev 3y ago> The first Cerabyte solution, CeraMemory, will come as a cartridge that contains sheets with ceramic coatings. If you looked closely at the data stored, it would look like "quasi-punched cards in nano-scale."
- prologist 3y agoTheir road map to denser storage, TB/cm vs GB/cm, mentions tapes. The cartridges make sense since they're essentially cd-roms, CeraTape on the other hand with 10 nanometer coating seems like magic. > Meanwhile, CeraTape (2030-35) gives away the storage medium type in its name. These data tapes will have a 5 µm thick substrate with a 10 nm thick ceramic coating.
- theultdev 3y agoCeramic film is used in window tinting and seems durable enough. It can stand the rollers and the elements. I assume the film for storage will be in a protective housing, but even exposed I don't see a problem.
- Anarch157a 3y agoProbably the same way Samsung make a foldable screen with a layer of glass, make it thin.
- kveykva 3y agoThe miniaturization of what are in some senses fired clay tablets for information storage would be a fascinating development.
- staplers 3y agoFull circle Mesopotamia
- toss1 3y agoAssuming that their claim is true that they will soon(-ish?) be writing TB/cm^2 and reading at GB/sec rates using electron beams, this seems like a very cool breakthrough in electron beam microscopy, both size and price, and there would be many other uses for their technology. I could Sooo much use a portable/tabletop electron beam microscope!!
- thomastjeffery 3y ago> CeraMemory cartridges (2025-30) storing between 10 PB and 100 PB, and its CeraTape (2030-35) with up to 1 EB capacity per tape. > Cerabyte says its technology can read and write data at GB/s class speeds. 1EB = 1,000 PB = 1,000,000 TB = 1,000,000,000 GB To read the 10PB cartridge at: 1GB/sec = 115.740.. days 10GB/sec = 277.7.. hours 100GB/sec = 27.7.. hours To read the 1EB tape at: 1GB/sec = 31.7 years 10GB/sec = 3.17 years 100GB/sec = 115.7 days 1TB/sec = 11.57 days 10TB/sec = 1.2 days
- AussieWog93 3y agoMight be good enough for archival storage, though.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoAn archive that takes 30 years to write... What would you write it from?
- nine_k 3y agoAny constant stream of data, from seismographs and radio telescopes to surveillance cameras.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoYou have 1GB/sec of that in one place?
- TheRealPomax 3y agoThe problem, as always, is that if this is just a single company, then they are going to die a quiet death from not being able to break into the market. If they're a single company selling licenses to their patents and production line, then maybe it'll work.
- hellotomyrars 3y agoI think they could absolutely make it work as a single company. The hurdle is proving the technology actually works and manufacturing it. If they can actually produce the product they claim, I don’t think failing to break in to the market will be much of a concern. They’d be in a league of their own. However, if the tech doesn’t actually work they way they claim, or if competing tech can do the job better, then they’ll go nowhere. Realistically, if they deliver on the product they claim to have they’re not going to last long but not because the company fails. They’ll be swept up by a bigger player in the industry.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI think AWS, Azure, and GCP would be very interested in such a technology. It could serve as a glacier replacement.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoAll three of those would prefer the cheapest, immediately replaceable option of off the shelf drives rather than small run, low availability drives. Even if the dollar per petabyte figure is lower, "we can't make that many" is a problem if you want to sell to AWS and friends. It's going to be a long time before these drives hit AWS scale, so they'll need to win over the much smaller fish first. And of course these days with AWS, the other risk is Amazon going "yeah we're just going to literally steal your idea and make our own, and there's nothing you can do about it because no lawsuit you bring would fine us an amount we can't just write off as a business expense" if it'll save them enough money.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
- pizzafeelsright 3y agoAnd we're back to chiseling on stone tablets.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- erik_seaberg 3y ago“And we’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere. And to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.” —Hitchhiker’s Guide
- tohnjitor 3y agoWe have such wonderful things to store for you.
- Dylan16807 3y agoThe claim to cost 75% less is so useless. It seems to be based on a very particular scenario based on multi-decade storage, and doesn't seem to recognize that new drives are denser than old drives. Please just say drive cost and media cost.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago> Please just say drive cost and media cost. Either they don’t know, or its the ol’ industry smokescreen to charge more opportunistically.
- cvccvroomvroom 3y agoThis sounds like an 8K TV in a flying car. Talking to the press before having product instead of stealth mode until having a functional prototype typically means they're going nowhere.
- docandrew 3y agoI’ve wondered if extremely dense storage like this would give rise to a new “tape trading” or bootleg culture - if you could export Spotify’s entire catalog or every movie made so far to a single storage tape and duplicate it all, what would that be like?
- Z_I_F_F 3y agoI believe the main bottleneck for that would be finding seeders for a collection that large, not a lack of storage.
- fodkodrasz 3y agoI wonder how dust/scratches might affect the supposed spectacular data density. A single scratch can wipe out terabytes of data... (even with FEC)
- leptons 3y agoAt that scale, devoting a significant portion of the storage space to parity or redundant data seems plausible if not required. A scratch doesn't have to mean wiping any data completely.
- michaelhoney 3y agoThe article did well to call out the extraordinary claim that it is stable in a huge temperate range, starting close to absolute zero.
- mikewarot 3y agoAm I the only one who wonders how long until diffusion randomizes things in a 10 nanometer thick film? Obviously, error correction will be part of the system. It seems to me that there will always be a measurable raw error rate. It would be quite useful to have those raw and corrected error counts exposed in order to manage this new class of storage proactively. I don't care if there are correctable errors, I just care if they suddenly increase, or change in nature.
- isoprophlex 3y agoI don't think you will see a lot of diffusion (or any kind of chemical degradation) in a 10 nm (100 angstroms, say ~100 layers of atoms) thick slab. Unless you bombard it with a molecular beam, but that'd be really weird and deliberate. Maybe you can get some light atoms (hydrogen) diffusing through it... but not displacing whatever is in their ceramic.
- vlovich123 3y agoPeople in this thread seem to miss the comparison against tape storage which caps out at 1GB/s today. If this thing can also do random access, it is legitimately a totally new ball game for archival storage and how storage products are built / conceived.
- cerabyte 3y agoIt is PB per RACK!! Not per cartridge!