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.
Read and single write capability is an interesting proposition for archival purposes. 8-10MB/s write and 50-200MB/s read speeds
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.
Wonder how rough bit rot would be though.
What form would that take? They seem to indicate lifetime on the centuries, similar to expectations for M-DISC.
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 and innovation in this space, too many cartels due to high capex siloing. This looks more like CDs, could be everywhere in a few years.
Glass flowing to be thicker at the bottom is a myth.
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
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).