femtosecond laser has been running at 80MHz for decades, they cannot just talk to the laser manufacture and ask them casually to increase that to 500MHz or above. so, it is better to take a grain of salt of the claim speed can be increase to 500Mbps in 5 years.
The cost of the femtosecond laser also won't come down easily either. At $75k a pop for the laser alone, who can afford such technology?
Split the laser into 7 ish spots and read all of them at once?
That doesn’t sound that hard…
You can also make them out of semiconductors. VCSELs and other semiconductor gain media naturally have short upper state lifetimes. It makes for a happy stable femtosecond laser with a semiconductor saturable absorber.
Maybe someday we’ll get Star Trek style clear “chips” that store our information and can be read at Gbps speeds.
Soon. Someday soon.
Assuming I did the math right, that means it'd take almost 3 years at max write speed to fill up the 360TB drive. So yeah, not quite ready for public consumption just yet.
It'll only take 900 years to write using a single drive. ;-)
I'll need to be at least as fast (a 100x speedup) and at least as compact as LTO.
Hope to see rapid improvements in this tech!
war and peace[1] is 3.2 MB in the plain text version, so it will take less than a second to store it.
typpilol•1mo ago
4mbps write and 30mbps read is extremely slow. Even if they achieve their roadmap 500mbps is still slow compared to modern drives.
Better not keep any data you need access to within like 90 days on it or you're toast.
What market is this even aiming for? Bitcoiners?
qdotme•1mo ago
Long term databanks. Libraries. GitHub’s archive bunkers. Microfilm replacements.
ycui1986•1mo ago
I am not aware any laser scanning technology that can do 16-bit accuracy that has no moving part. so, fundamentally, this is a storage technology with mechanical addressing.
laser can be scanned by acoustic wave, but that itself lack the beam pointing accuracy. the ultrasonic drive frequency will limit how fast is can deflects the laser beam.
dummydummy1234•1mo ago
There are plenty of things that need to be archived in a basement and never read unless the more readily available forms get corrupted.
Having the ability to say as long as the item exists the data exists is valuable, especially with not having to worry about degradation (which happens with tapes/flash/hard drives)
The ability to say that the data is good.
abound•1mo ago
It's even slower when you consider the 360 TB capacity -- it'd take nearly three years to write to the whole thing.
netsharc•1mo ago