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.
  • ProletarianDictator [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    15·
    20 days ago

    With 360 TB, I’d be torrenting everything in existence, keeping offline archives of useful datasets, and maybe start hustling copies of Anna’s Archive or the entire Spotify catalog leak.

    Since most media will never need to be changed, you only need to make sure to organize everything beforehand.

    Even then, since the volume is so big, it seems like you could simply keep appending shit, even modified files, from one end of the disk, and maintain a database record of the current sectors containing those files and keep it on the opposite end of the disk, so it can also infinitely grow from the other direction. Or maybe append changes as diffs to the original data.

    I wonder if there is a filesystem format that would be particularly suited to this, or if something more specialized would need to be developed.

    Just freeing up the faster, writable NVMe space would be a huge win. Seems great for a NAS even with the limitations.

    • the rizzler@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      6·
      20 days ago

      btrfs on linux, zfs on pretty much everything, and apfs on apple (CoW filesystems) already append new data blocks to the end of the drive rather than modify existing ones. obviously if this is gonna become a thing they would need to do it with the metadata too. the problem with that is the longer the drive is in use, the more metadata you have to read in to use it. probably easier to use a traditional drive just for the metadata.

      besides that, cd/dvd/blu-ray filesystems are all adapted for write-once media. actually, they’re purpose-built for pretty much this exact thing (besides the size of the disks they support). so never mind all that other shit i just said