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.
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.
This is also assuming that reading and writing are mutually exclusive.
The places where this level of storage density and longevity are valuable are places that are generating terabytes or tens of terabytes a day. Especially scientific research.
It is definitely an interesting development, and the lack of bit rot makes it incredibly useful as an archival system. However, I am curious if the surrounding hardware necessary to actually successfully read from it is going to be as long-lived. Similar to magnetic hard drives, I am sure the plates that are being written to need to exist in an extremely sterile and particle-free environment in order to be read and written to.