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.
  • Jesusaurus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    30·
    15 hours ago

    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
      17·
      14 hours ago

      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.

      • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        3·
        9 hours ago

        The data is burned into a piece of glass with a laser. It doesn’t use a dye to store data like a CD-R. I doubt bit rot would be much of an issue. With that much capacity, you could use lots of forward error correction though.

      • gnate@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        15 hours ago

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

        • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
          111·
          14 hours ago

          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.

            • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
              21·
              10 hours ago

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

              • Sneezycat@sopuli.xyz
                6·
                6 hours ago

                The window panes were cut from irregular sheets, and they were simply installed with the thicker part at the bottom, for structural integrity.

                It was a manufacturing quirk.

        • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          5·
          13 hours ago

          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
    14·
    14 hours ago

    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.