The main petabyte onerous disk force might per chance well comprise glass

The main petabyte onerous disk force might per chance well comprise glass

(Image credit rating: Jonathan Banks / Microsoft)

There is a increasing consensus among storage producers worldwide that glass might per chance well change into a crucial component within the force to satiate humanity’s thirst for records storage.

Fuelled by the upward thrust in request of excessive resolution video and increasing IoT networkd, IDC predicts the world will originate 175 zettabytes (ZB) of info by 2025, nearly about six instances better than in 2018.

Given one ZB is equal to 1 thousand million TB, it’d be cheap to rob that we are going to salvage reached the solutions-boggling trillion terabyte designate by the discontinuance of the final decade.



Microsoft’s Venture Silica first brought optical records storage into the limelight. Researchers at the world’s largest intention company – and the second supreme hyperscaler subsequent to AWS – managed to pack 75.6TB of info onto a share of fused silica that modified into in regards to the scale of a 2.5-sail onerous disk force. In comparability, the world’s largest onerous disk drives currently max out at 20TB and are in a phenomenal elevated 3.5-sail make say.

In an announcement to IEEE Detect, Seagate CTO John Morris confirmed its R&D lab is also working on the employ of glass as a medium for optical records storage. “The say is to originate systems that can be taught and write with cheap throughput,” he acknowledged.

Needless to claim, opponents equivalent to Western Digital, Toshiba and even Samsung are inclined to be following the identical route.

On the opposite hand, there are some pretty significant challenges to be solved first. Comely now, the medium is be taught-easiest, making it supreme for Write-As soon as, Learn-Many (WORM) employ instances.

Extra, given there obtained’t be any terabit cyber web connection for not not up to a pair a protracted time, backing up one of these monsters to a cloud storage provider might per chance well also rob better than a lifetime, once they hit the market.

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