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.
At 10MB/s it’d take you 416 days if constant writes to fill it up.
EXTREMELY slow archival.
At least for now, till it gets better
If you’re not creating more than 800GB a day of new data you can just let it run with a faster drive as a buffer in front of it.
Or get 10 of them and run them in parallel. Maybe get 11 and throw in a bit of parity, just in case bitrot surfaces after the first 1000 years or something.
Let’s say I want to preserve my computer disks when I do a major change (i.e. 10TB worth of NAS or just 4TB worth of workstation) or when I sell it or just throw it away. What do I do? Time is not essential. Or as others said, store photos and other large files. It’s for archival, not for backup purposes.
@Mihies @douglasg14b
Stick the drive in a USB caddy and keep it?
If it’s an array, buy a big one and then repeat from step 1…
That’d work only if I throw the computer away.
@Mihies I honestly don’t see why, no, not at all. If you want to keep the data then you plug the drive into anything else with a USB interface. If you don’t want to keep the data, what’s the problem? Just format it and donate it, whole.