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.
  • RedGreenBlue@lemmy.zip
    1·
    1 小时前

    The drives are write-once media — data cannot be erased or rewritten once stored

    I could find a use for these. My pacman package cache maybe.

  • Jesusaurus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    6 小时前

    Read and single write capability is an interesting proposition for archival purposes. 8-10MB/s write and 50-200MB/s read speeds

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
      7·
      4 小时前

      I do photography, and I like to keep the original RAW photos from the camera. So, this sort of thing would be perfect for me. I don’t really need fast write access, since I just want to back the photos up and it’s not time sensitive.

      • gnate@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        6 小时前

        What form would that take? They seem to indicate lifetime on the centuries, similar to expectations for M-DISC.

        • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
          5·
          4 小时前

          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.

            • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
              2·
              46 分钟前

              Yeah, I’ve heard that and I’ve seen pictures of examples, dunno. Personally, anything beyond a century is irrelevant anyway.

          • untorquer@quokk.auEnglish
            1·
            3 小时前

            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

        • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          3·
          4 小时前

          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).

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    5·
    5 小时前

    More bytes is more bytes. Flood the market until big AI firms can’t afford to monopolize the hardware anymore and finally collapse so we real people can finally compute again.

    • marxismtomorrow@lemmy.today
      5·
      5 小时前

      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.

      • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
        6·
        5 小时前

        Like I said, more bytes is more bytes. Even if it’s a niche use case, that takes pressure off of other use cases.