SPhotonix – 360TB into 5-inch glass disc with femtosecond laser

Lots of archival applications that can use this today at these speeds, assuming you’re staging the data like you would for tape. It’s slow, but permanent from a longevity perspective. You could fit 200PB of the Internet Archive in ~600 of these 5 inch glass discs. Hopefully speeds improve, along with infra to treat the media similar to an automated tape library.

It might have a place in its current state,as far as write speed goes

war and peace[1] is 3.2 MB in the plain text version, so it will take less than a second to store it.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600

With these numbers the use cases seem limited to small batches of data that need the extreme durability, but to fully use this durability, you'd need to launch your archives to highly eliptical orbits that would take them to the further reaches of the solar system, because the Sun will be a white dwarf long before the warranty expires.

Multiplex the sensor?

Split the laser into 7 ish spots and read all of them at once?

That doesn’t sound that hard…

We have GHz femtosecond lasers. It's commercialized! Amplitude Systemes has them for sale! We build time references out of them!

You can also make them out of semiconductors. VCSELs and other semiconductor gain media naturally have short upper state lifetimes. It makes for a happy stable femtosecond laser with a semiconductor saturable absorber.

My guess is their plan is to multiplex the laser. How many lasers can be reading/writing at the same time?

Surely the only intended customers are giant organizations with petabytes of data. Millions of dollars for their archival system does not seem unreasonable. I recall reading a story that movie studios refresh their physical media for their archives every N years to prevent data loss. If these slabs of glass are stable that removes an ongoing operational burden. Just make a single chip with all of the assets per movie.

The better question is the seek latency. The bandwidth for read isn’t too horrible, if the seeks can be kept within reason. This is somewhere between tapes and actual pressed optical media (not dyed /re/writeable). Should seek way faster than tape (maybe even on par with BluRay) and 30Mbps read is manageable for doomsday scenarios.

Long term databanks. Libraries. GitHub’s archive bunkers. Microfilm replacements.

Long term storage, along the lines of tape replacement/supplement?

There are plenty of things that need to be archived in a basement and never read unless the more readily available forms get corrupted.

Having the ability to say as long as the item exists the data exists is valuable, especially with not having to worry about degradation (which happens with tapes/flash/hard drives)

The ability to say that the data is good.

> 4mbps write and 30mbps read is extremely slow.

It's even slower when you consider the 360 TB capacity -- it'd take nearly three years to write to the whole thing.

Had to go back to the article to see the actual speed units. Above commenter meant MBps (Megabytes/second), not millibits/seconds nor megabits/second.

If any alien race gets a copy of Grokipedia, we are doomed.

I'd love to see lower-density glass storage made with home laser engravers. Something like 50GB per 5in^2.