this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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At 10,000tb, it could have a latency of 5 minutes and it'd probably still be useful for long term storage.
Edit: it's also useful to note that it sounds like these are write-once, read many. That means for consumers, they might eventually replace Blurays, but they probably won't be replacing your hard drive.
Yeah that would be the only useful use case. However I think with even a few seconds of latency I could deal with that for things like video playback since it would quite literally up my storage by a few orders of magnitude.
Yeah it wasn't so long ago that hard drive storage was more expensive than spindles of CD-Rs and that was around the time that internet and torrenting were taking off. People used to burn CDs full of movies to share and make room to download more. In that use case a unit of 700 MB on write once read many storage was useful if cheap.
Depending on price, consumers may be able to afford multiples. They could in theory use them until no space remains. This would be be fine for any data storage that people want, but obvious wouldn't be good as your c drive.
Also, if they can truly be manufactured on the cheap, it could be a good backup system for anyone with a digital collection of photos / movies / etc. My photo collection doesn't change much but takes up a decent amount of space. If I could buy one of these a year, dump a bunch of photos, then bury it in the yard (or whatever) for the event of a drive failure. I'd be cool with that - something sturdy enough to take some abuse as a backup drive with a long memory and low failure rate.
10k TB would be enough to backup all my data hundreds of times over. If I made a cold copy every 3 months of everything, even accounting for increasing data over time, I'd probably die before making it through a single one.
I'm sure the plates are reasonable but are you going to be sticking a electron microscope in your office...?
We're talking about equipment that's hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in order to write and read from these plates.
I get your point, but the consumer version may not need to be as complex as an electron microscope. Additionally, there will be much more demand for these than electron microscopes. I'm speculating here, but both of these factors together could reduce the price significantly.