China Achieves Mass Production Breakthrough with 360TB Glass Hard Drives Researchers at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) have achieved small-scale mass production of glass-based hard drives, a breakthrough that could transform enterprise cold data storage. Each glass disc can store a staggering 360 terabytes of data across 400 stacked layers, using laser "carving" technology that writes data into the internal structure of the glass medium.
  • Markaos@discuss.tchncs.de
    2·
    2 hours ago

    This is seriously cool. Although the current specs are a bit funny - if you take the largest possible disc size (360 TB), then it would take a million hours to fully write it at 10 MB/s (more if the storage unit is actually TiB). That’s over a hundred years.

    Also if the goal is datacenter archival, then I wonder what the plan for practical use is - many individual discs with separate write “heads” (basically a RAID 0) to bring the speed up? And then maybe the maximum size per disc is a theoretical limit for the technology once we get faster access rather than something practical they intend to build anytime soon.