Technology

My apologies to the set designers of The Donnager/Rocinante on The Expanse, for when I said "Ugh, not the glass tile future computer trope again."

To all the naysayers: if the claims hold up this will be super useful for some industries. Example, I worked at a human genomics lab for diagnostics. By law we were supposed to retain raw data for a whopping 120 years. With a couple terabyte per individual for a WGS, the storage and backup costs were very much non-trivial.

I don't think consumer use is even on Cerabyte's roadmap. They are proposing rack-mounted units for datacenters, and the roadmap includes upgrading from lasers to electron microscopes for higher density in the future. The media are super dense but the equipment to read and write that media is large and complex.

There was some discussion on this a few months back in this thread, as well: https://lemmy.world/post/4695105

As I noted in that other thread, they were set to present at the Storage Developer Conference in October. Looks like the video of their presentation is available now. I have not yet watched it. https://storagedeveloper.org/events/agenda/session/527

Edit: Looking through their presentation PDF, they refer to access times from 10 seconds to 90 seconds. That's whole seconds, no milli, micro, or nano. More a substitute for archival tapes than hard drives or SSDs. They don't seem to address any use case besides cold storage. I'm not saying that to dismiss or criticize the tech, just to point out that the linked article seems to be off target in its analysis, particularly in the headline.

Data hoarders will love it if it's cheaper than current storage methods. How much would you need to pay for 10PB right now?

Wow, more amazing technology I can't wait to never hear about again...

Finally something that could hold my entire porn collection.

Something I sometimes think about is how much of humanity's history is just like, gone. Completely forgotten to time. Great works of art that'll never be seen. Amazing compositions that'll never again be heard. An uncalculable number of lifetimes reduced to nothing more than food for the dirt.

The proposition that we could store vast amounts of our current experience on archival slabs and preserve it all far into our distant future is incredibly exciting to me. It wouldn't only allow us to indefinitely preserve all of these incredible works of art our modern world has enabled. But would also allow us to more effectively learn from our collective societal mistakes. It would hopefully be more difficult to ignore our past foibles when we keep such detailed receipts... Hopefully.

If not at least they'll have SpongeBob in 7023 to distract from the cyber-nazis.

I can't wait to never be able to afford this

Interesting.

How many write-erase cycles can be done?

Now if they could only make one that only costs a couple thousand dollars and fits in a full height 5.25" drive bay.

I know it was said before in previous decades as storage evolved, but: How the fuck, do you eve fill these up?