No. My understanding from the video is that it's a write-once solution, so if anything it would just be a replacement for tape backup, so not sure why it's comparing it to hard drives and SSDs.
My understanding is that every drive is write-once and once full it doesn’t change. Eventually, if most of the file data/blocks stored on a drive are deleted by users, the whole drive is erased and re-written.
That said, while being write-once only isn’t a blocker, my guess is seek latency will still prevent this tech from replacing spinning disks.
If the deletion is meant as a security feature, then you can "delete" a file by making it encrypted and deleting it's decryption key.
If a cloud storage provider doesn't charge for infinite version, that's not very different from offering "unlimited storage" plans: They have pretty good statistics of how much the average user really uses on an "unlimited" plan and will price their services accordingly. Revision history just adds another term to the same equation.
In the early days at one such provider I know that garbage collecting deleted user files was considered a relatively low priority cost-wise.
If you have enough capacity, write-once is enough. Indeed, MLC SSDs can often be rewritten a couple hundred times. Consumer HDDs are specified for 180TB written per year.
Would you rather have:
* A HDD that can store 22TB and can be written 180TB per year for 5 years until the helium leaks out (900TB total writes).
* A 10,000 TB storage cartridge that can initially store 10,000TB, but as you "erase" stuff the capacity falls.
The latter can tolerate 1,000 TB "erased" per year for 5 years and still store 5,000TB at the end.
Correct, but the primary reason those technologies have shorter retention times is because they are rewritable. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison that doesn't make any sense. It would make sense if the article was clear that this was about improving archival storage options, and then comparing to things like CDs/DVDs, tape, and film.
* HDDs fail, or these days helium leaks out at end of lifespan.
* SSDs slowly have the data leak out of floating cells.