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.
These would be useless for AI given the high write requirements inherent to any form of ‘AI’ in use today; but data centers would absolute eat these up for low-write CDN usage, i.e. netflix which only updates their catalogue once every few days but needs high read speeds for multiple users. So we’d still be competing with data centers for them, but luckily just much fewer.
It would make (assuming it can fit in a standard 3.5" bay) petabyte+ home data servers pretty trivial to set up though which is pretty neat. 4k Jellyfin data hoarders should rejoice.
Like I said, more bytes is more bytes. Even if it’s a niche use case, that takes pressure off of other use cases.