6 ms·
DVD's New Cousin Can Store More Than a Petabit
- ksec 3y ago>All in all, a DVD-size version of the new disc has a capacity of up to 1.6 petabits—that is, 1.6 million gigabits. This is some 4,000 times greater data density than a Blu-ray disc and 24 times that of the currently most advanced hard disks. 1.6 petabits is 0.2PB, or 200TB. The highest shipping density hard drive is 22TB or 30TB depending on whether you are consumer or cooperate customer. But even with 22TB is is only 9 times. Not 24 times.
- ramshanker 3y agoAnd if we are willing to include newer EDSSF SSDS, we are already at 256TB per drive. https://www.servethehome.com/samsung-256tb-e3-l-nvme-ssd-at-fms-2023/ https://www.servethehome.com/samsung-256tb-e3-l-nvme-ssd-at-...
- Keyframe 3y agoWe're looking at what, multi PB per 1U now? Future is getting insane!
- ksec 3y agoYes. 8PB per 1U. Or Nearly 1 Exabyte in 3 Racks. Unfortunately the 256TB was really a Tech demo only. Last time I checked even the 64TB EDSFF wasn't selling due most companies thinking 32TB was the sweet spot for redundancy, safety etc.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago[flagged]
- Arcuru 3y agoThe highest density hard drives have 10 platters[1], storing about 2.2TB each. So if they're talking density in terms of bytes per square cm, 24 is probably reasonable. HDD platters are certainly smaller than DVD-size, and the 24x claim would be true if they were ~25% the size of a DVD which seems about right. [1] https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/04/13/seagate-22tb-disk-capacity/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/04/13/seagate-22tb-disk-capa...
- LoganDark 3y agoIt's 200TB. Not "more than a petabit". Please don't switch the units around just to make it sound bigger, it's disrespectful.
- caslon 3y agoIt is more than a petabit, though. A petabit is a hundred and twenty five terabytes.
- _kb 3y agoParent comment was likely hinting more at the bytes to bits switcheroo. Yes, technically the figure is correct but it's about as honest as a conversation about finance and switching from US dollars to Zimbabwean dollars.
- LoganDark 3y agoThe story of the one hundred trillion dollar bill is tragic but its existence today is simply hilarious.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoI think it's so nice that storage, RAM, and Internet providers still use bits for the last 3 PDP owners out there who aren't on octets yet
- thrill 3y ago(12 bit) Word.
- globular-toast 3y agoThere are legitimate reasons for storage to be specified in bits. Having to put everything in bytes is something you have to do for computer memory because it's only byte addressable. This is actually inconvenient and inefficient for a lot of real data. DNA and protein sequences come to mind. But storage isn't just about computers. Internet and PC memory manufacturers have no excuse, though. It's just bigger numbers despite not being able to work with individual bits.
- seventytwo 3y agoWhat’s the read and write speed?
- mike_hock 3y ago> writing speed of about 100 milliseconds and an energy consumption of microjoules to millijoules Since this is on an IEEE website, I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the writer accidentally omitted the unit of data this applies to, but understands that the sentence is meaningless without it. But the fact that apparently no one proofread the text still makes this a garbage-grade publication.
- seventytwo 3y agoUnless it’s 1 bit per 100ms?
- dataflow 3y agoI'll believe it when I see it. Whatever happened to the stuff they advertised a decade ago? https://www.pcworld.com/article/444272/sony-panasonic-develop-300gb-optical-discs-for-enterprise-storage.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/444272/sony-panasonic-develo...
- runlevel1 3y agoWhat about 2 decades ago? From 2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20150526182019/http://phys.org/news/2004-08-breakthrough-nanotechnology-terabyte-inch-digital.html https://web.archive.org/web/20150526182019/http://phys.org/n... EDIT: Here's a more modest proposal of 125 GB in a crystal cube from IBM in 1995: https://web.archive.org/web/19970121005010/http://www.research.ibm.com/research/press/holographic.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970121005010/http://www.resear...
- LinuxBender 3y agoThis is exactly what I have been waiting for but development seems to have gone silent. I like the idea of no moving parts. It was supposed to have massive throughput and capacity though by today's standards 125GB is not that big. I would love to have a cartridge that inside has a 3D crystal like the crystals from the older superman movies. That idea to me seems less fragile than a spinning disk and has the potential for substantially higher throughput.
- RiverCrochet 3y agoIt reminded me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc
- boomboomsubban 3y agohttps://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1549173-REG/sony_odc_5500r_us_5_5tb_optical_disc_archive.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1549173-REG/sony_odc_.... It seems dishonest to say it has the same dimensions as a bluray when even that article somewhat says it will be sold as a cartridge, but Sony did make and sell that product.
- gamepsys 3y ago> (writing) an energy per bit of information of 17 μJ [0] It's interesting to think about data as μJ per bit. The article seems to hint that this is too high for practical use, but I'm honestly clueless how this would compare to other storage mediums. It also makes me wonder what amount of energy premium are we paying for remote data and what amount of energy premium we are paying for wireless transmission. [0] From their Nature article
- b112 3y agoIt seems doubly weird, as blu-rays and other such things they are comparing to aren't written, but pressed as is when sold in large copies. I get that a lot of uses may be as a hard drive, but imagine ginormous AI model files or some such, pressed and shipped as updates. The energy cost would be far different. Or maybe Ultra Mega Super HD 4D video. Or... or... blockchain history for bitcoin in a few years.
- rbanffy 3y agoPetabyte-sized models will be impractical for some time still. OTOH, 30 years should give us a million fold improvement in capacity, and, with in-memory computing (you really don’t want to move a petabyte) I’d say there is hope.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoAlso : > The researchers note that the entire procedure used to create blank discs made using AIE-DDPR films is compatible with conventional DVD mass production and can be completed within 6 minutes. Gu says these new discs may therefore prove to be manufacturable at commercial scales. So I'm triple-confused ??
- gpm 3y agoWriting a terabyte of information at 10c/kwh would cost $3.78 [1]. Not nothing, but doesn't seem entirely impractical for all cases. Heat dissipation might be an issue? [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=17+%CE%BCJ+%2F+bit+*+1+terabyte+in+kwh+*+10+cents%2Fkwh https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=17+%CE%BCJ+%2F+bit+*+1+...
- voldacar 3y agoCan we just stop measuring data in bits? Stop making me constantly multiply or divide by 8 in my head for no reason It's a 200tb disk
- slyall 3y agoTerra = Capital-T Bytes = Capital-B 200TB not 200tb
- kwhitefoot 3y agoTera :-)
- bmacho 3y agoYou shouldn't use exclusively bytes. Use both, or just bits.
- TheNewAndy 3y agoAt least historically, the definition of "byte" has been "the smallest addressable unit" which on most of today's machines is 8 bits, but not all (I believe the SHARC floating point DSPs are still 32-bit bytes, and there are probably more). Using bits for things makes sense from this perspective as the number of bytes would depend on which processor it is connected to. I know that these days people consider that a byte is 8 bits by definition, but I think that probably isn't a great linguistic move (we already have a word for that - octet)
- Beldin 3y ago"By eight" isn't a bad term for 8 things either. Linguistically speaking, it's often abbreviated to "byte".
- Dylan16807 3y agoHistory doesn't matter, the linguistic move happened long ago and you're too late to lodge complaints.
- t-3 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- larsrc 3y ago"highly durable" /me laughs in digital archivist
- Aardwolf 3y ago> Currently, he says, the new discs have a writing speed of about 100 milliseconds and an energy consumption of microjoules to millijoules. Milliseconds is not a unit of writing speed though. How many bits in that time?
- andrepd 3y agoI assume this is latency to start writing.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y agoOne. "The pixel dwell time (that is, the light exposure time) was 100 ms" The Nature article is linked from the IEEE article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06980-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06980-y It will first show a paywall, but under some conditions that I haven't figured out yet, it might forward you to a free full-text version: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06980-y.epdf?sharing_token=qp4YnvHTXspKNlu3aF5yKdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0P-cMwXam85heBcGZ2Wr3LrnsCqs0g7AG993xC_3aiS6UaqdlF3KmmgVUdyO11T6HK04Zx52dmSuIMV9tQLQIB4ZhD01kyRzaI7p26C0knCXghpHxbY3aaQv5JUdenh_VdANbken9blya1y6TnviYVwjH4BmifUk5tJ8EKNL6H20ihOaNBCYiUgz4ExNcKeqew%3D&tracking_referrer=spectrum.ieee.org https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06980-y.epdf?shar... Apparently Springer (the publisher behind Nature) has realized that researchers are getting fed up with giving away their work for free to publishers just to have it locked away behind paywalls that they don't profit from and that prevent them from sharing their own articles: https://www.springernature.com/gp/researchers/sharedit https://www.springernature.com/gp/researchers/sharedit
- mellutussa 3y agoId like one for incremental/whole backups please.
- tiagod 3y agoA DVD's surface area is around 134cm2. A microSD card area is around 1.65cm2. This means around 80 microSD cards in the surface area of a DVD. Multiplied by 2TB, the largest currently available microSD size, we get around 160TB, which is 1.28 Pb (Petabit).
- grugagag 3y agoInteresting calculation. If you shave a bit of area from each microSD to remove connectors and such you’d probably be able to fit 10-15% more..
- nordsieck 3y agoMy understanding is that SD cards are not good for even medium-term storage. They have to be powered on regularly or there's a good chance the data will be corrupted or lost entirely.
- StuffMaster 3y agoWhoah if that's true it should be more known...
- r3d0c 3y agoit takes about 10 years @ 55c for the memory cells to start losing charge without being powered, people who use them extensively do know for most other people it doesn't matter if they know because almost nobody uses SD cards for long term cold storage, and neither should they
- runarberg 3y agoI bet there are a lot of people with an old digital camera or two lying around with some photos on which they hope to look at one day. And if the same is true for solid state hard drives, we will probably find the same behavior with old laptops in about 5-10 year.
- hypercube33 3y ago
- mike_hock 3y agoI, for one, am not looking forward to another round of write-once optical storage media. Managing your data on DVD-Rs when they were bigger than your hard disk was a pain in the ass. I've gotten used to the fact that the largest storage media are not only rewritable, but are the same as the primary storage devices you use in your computer.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoI think we’ve reached a point where drives have grown substantially more than file size (a movie was 700mb when my harddrive was <400gb, then 4-12gb when I had 2-3tb, now they’re ~50gb if you want 4k but a 16tb drive is a few hundred dollars. Aside from movies I have little need to large volumes of storage, music files, photos and documents are insignificant in comparison. One thing I would like is a cheap backup mechanism capable of 1-20tb - if it’s cheap enough, immutable would be a good thing.
- mattferderer 3y agoThis reminds me of a recent talk by Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang. He discusses video compression history a bit. He proposes in the future one would just send a very small amount of data & then the computer displaying the video would recreate everything based on prior knowledge of the person talking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytZcvwZxkrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytZcvwZxkrg Aside from personal use, it's well known that the amount of data being created every day is growing exponentially. Based on the article these discs are not meant for personal use but for data centers.
- mateo1 3y agoA 90fps 8k UHD 10-bit movie that's 3 hours long is 120TB uncompressed. You might think that's too much, muh compression algorithms etc, but we have consumer devices that can use this kind of storage, and no economic means of transporting one-to-many, multi-TB files. I would absolutely welcome them, and use it to distribute the entirety of libgen (hypothetically, don't lock me up yet). Or really high resolution VR porn or documentaries. Either way there's good uses for it. It won't replace your hard drive but there's a market gap to fill.
- jtvjan 3y agoCan't wait to go to the store and buy a copy of GPT-7 on one of these
- Kye 3y agoWhat's that in station wagons full of tapes hurtling down the highway?
- bbanyc 3y agoAn LTO-9 tape cartridge can store 18 terabytes (they advertise 45 TB but that's with the built-in compression scheme and we want to compare raw bits to raw bits). One of these new 1.6 petabit discs would be just over 11 tapes, well under a station wagon.
- Aurornis 3y agoIn case you didn’t notice, this isn’t an actual, usable product. Scientists in a lab created a technique to encode bits into very tiny spaces across 100 layers. The proof of concept technique they created in a lab is so slow that it would take a full second for 10 pixels on the disc. The headline claiming that this is a new cousin of DVDs is clickbait. It’s a lab technique, but someone extrapolated it into the same area of a DVD and imagined how many bits it could theoretically hold.
- IndySun 3y agoA lot of IEEE Spectrum is clickbait, I find. Coupled with aggressive marketing and silly priced subscriptions, mean hype takes top billing on almost every story. Light not worth the candle.
- gamepsys 3y agoTo be fair, the lab did upload photos of a DVD sized disc. I think they started the comparison.
- aconz2 3y agoPretty cool, uses 2 femtosecond laser wavelengths for reading and another 2 for writing, with certain combination of beam shape to localize the spot to ~50nm and can focus 3d in 1 um spacing. Not clear on how much z the spot takes since they say 100um total with 1um spacing. I think the claim of storage per disc is with 100 layers per side. The "SharedIt" link to the paper reflows the text wrong on my laptop but looked okay on my phone. I want to go back to the Microsoft glass optical storage tech to see how this compares in technique. Comment section here really bums me out
- peter_d_sherman 3y ago>"The strategy the researchers used to write the data relies on a pair of lasers. The first, a green 515-nanometer laser, triggers spot formation, whereas the second, a red 639-nm laser, switches off the writing process. By controlling the time between firing of the lasers, the scientists could produce spots smaller than the wavelengths of light used to create them." Nice! More impressive, perhaps, than a 100+ layer CD/DVD/Optical Disk storing 1.6 PB or more in the future (and let's not kid ourselves -- that's pretty impressive!) -- is the process that gets us there... I wonder what other interesting applications this laser-based process could have in the future... Perhaps it could be used for future IC lithography (chip manufacturing) of some sort...