Researchers Develop New High-Speed Laser Writing Method, Enabling CD-Sized Glass Discs with 500 TB of Storage Capacity

[Zarathustra]

Yea the real issue is if they are actually re writeable or not.

I strongly suspect that they aren't, considering they are laser etched glass.

But if the media winds up being cheap enough maybe that doesn't matter? Just toss and replace when you consume all the space. I mean, 500TB is quite a lot of space. Maybe you even use a fraction of it, and virtually erase old data by marking that portion of the glass used, and once all of the space is consumed move on to the next glass disk?

Heck, you could even combine this method with a method that uses multiple smaller glass squares all side by side. The laser shifts between them, but not too far to add too much latency. In firmware you set it up such that they are filled in order, oldest to newest. You have a feeder that can add glass squares when needed. Once only one glass square is left, the remaining data on the full glass square that has had the most data deleted is transferred to the new square. That old square is the purged, and a new glass square is added from the feeder.

Could be a cool way of doing it.

 

[Brian_B]

Yea the real issue is if they are actually re writeable or not.

It talks about etching glass, so I am assuming no.

But if the media winds up being cheap enough maybe that doesn't matter? Just toss and replace when you consume all the space. I mean, 500TB is quite a lot of space.

If it's just "glass" - that's cheap and easily recyclable, so I expect what you say here would be true - just toss the old one, re-write, and go. The real investment is just the time it takes to write the disc.

 

[Endgame]

The way I would likely use it at my old job.

take the existing archive of 7 years of audit data and 15 years of raw records and write them to glass. (Appx 100TB of data the last time I dealt with it, certainly more now). Continue my existing tape drive solution for daily, weekly, and monthly backups. annually I would create 3 new glass media replacing the oldest year of data with the newest year. After 7 years, I would discard the oldest glass, and continue the media rotation.

Once I was certain the tech was working well, and Given I would have plenty of spare space on the glass, I would also consider appending the newest monthly backup to the current year media, eventually dropping tape media for monthly and weekly backups. Given the rotation frequency for daily backups, though, I might leave those on tape, or at least on dedicated on site glass. Depends on how expensive a 500tb disc cost.

 

[Grimlakin]

I see this more as disk based backup with a rotation to glass after x time period. Storing and protecting the glass would be the tricky bit I imagine.