China Achieves Mass Production Breakthrough with 360TB Glass Hard Drives
Researchers at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) have achieved small-scale mass production of glass-based hard drives, a breakthrough that could transform enterprise cold data storage. Each glass disc can store a staggering 360 terabytes of data across 400 stacked layers, using laser "carving" technology that writes data into the internal structure of the glass medium.
Wonder how rough bit rot would be though.
The data is burned into a piece of glass with a laser. It doesn’t use a dye to store data like a CD-R. I doubt bit rot would be much of an issue. With that much capacity, you could use lots of forward error correction though.
What form would that take? They seem to indicate lifetime on the centuries, similar to expectations for M-DISC.
Gonna guess glass deformation over time is going to come into play (really (like millennia) old windows get thicker at the bottom), probably why the quartz version of this is speculated to be good for millions of years. And of course breakage. The drives will fail first.
Sucks to be Microslop sitting on this for years and years and China comes along and eats your lunch. Ha Ha.
Hopefully a story soon to be repeated with RAM and then chips, about time there was real competition.
Glass flowing to be thicker at the bottom is a myth.
Yeah, I’ve heard that and I’ve seen pictures of examples, dunno. Personally, anything beyond a century is irrelevant anyway.
The window panes were cut from irregular sheets, and they were simply installed with the thicker part at the bottom, for structural integrity.
It was a manufacturing quirk.
Spin them once daily or weekly. As long as they’re balanced that should randomize the gravity vector.
It’s also almost certainly a different composition than century old glass panes made for buildings. So the material itself might mitigate this issue
Like the other user mentioned, glass warping/deformation. Although I’d reckon kinetic impacts, tremors, or actual drive failure would occur first (the real question is what are the maximum tolerances before a read/write fails or ends in data corruption).