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Meet the Super DVD: Scientists Develop Massive 1 Petabit Optical Disk (gizmodo.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

95 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Note: Unfortunately the research paper linked in the article is a dead/broken/wrong link. Perhaps the author will update it later.

From the limited coverage, it doesn't sound like there's an actual optical drive that utilizes this yet and that it's just theoretical based on the properties of the material the researchers developed.

I'm not holding my breath, but I would absolutely love to be able to back up my storage system to a single optical disc (even if tens of TBs go unused).

If they could make a R/W version of that, holy crap.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Storage are measured in bytes because data are stored in that form, with an individual bit being meaningless but a single byte often being significant. Network throughputs are measured in bits per second because the time-density of data is the significant thing there, not the total number of bytes transmitted.

There are 8 bits in a byte and there are 9 degrees Rankine in every 5 degrees Celsius, but if I told you the temperature for tomorrow in degrees Rankine, you would still think me weird for saying it that way and you might wonder what I was hiding.

There are almost always dozens of units we could use to describe something, but it's okay to call it out when someone says something unusually as the original headline did.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I never claimed disks should be measured in bytes... And still with this per second thing which has no bearing on this. How data is stored is irrelevant to how it's measured in transit. That's kind of like saying kilometers are measured in kilometers per hour, but a drag strip is a quarter mile. So you've lost me on whatever point you're trying to make there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

The original comment in this thread was about how the article lists the capacity of this experimental disk in bits, and posited that bytes are the usual unit to use.

The next comment was about how networks are measured in bits.

So my replies since then have been about two points, first that bits are still inappropriate to use here even if networks use them, and second that networks use bits per second, which is a different unit than bits.

That's kind of like saying kilometers are measured in kilometers per hour, but a drag strip is a quarter mile

It's more like saying speed is measured in kilometers per hour rather than kilometers (point 2) while also saying that the country we're talking about measures distance in miles usually (point 1).