{"id":12188,"date":"2024-10-29T12:58:43","date_gmt":"2024-10-29T19:58:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=12188"},"modified":"2024-10-29T21:42:16","modified_gmt":"2024-10-30T04:42:16","slug":"cerabyte-ceramic-storage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=12188","title":{"rendered":"Cerabyte\u00a0Ceramic storage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In two years, Cerabyte built a prototype ceramic storage system solely from commercially available, off the shelf parts. They believe they can build palm-sized cartridges that can store 10,000TB of data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Each cartridge is a layer of glass, similar to Gorilla Glass by Corning, with a thin, dark ceramic layer as the actual data storage medium. These cartridges are kept in a robotic library. When data needs to be read or written, the cartridge is moved from the library rack to the read-write device.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Data is written by two million laser beamlets that punch QR code-like nano-scale patterns into the surface of the media. Data can be written at GBps speeds, with TB\/square-centimeter densities \u2013 much greater than the density of HDDs which only hit 0.02TB\/square-centimeter in current drives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It will be interesting to see how resilient the data storage is for the long term. One disadvantage is likely that they are only write-once media. But if the media is just a piece of glass with a ceramic coating; it may be relatively cheap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The advantages, however, could be breath-taking. Besides the incredible amount of storage density, these could be game changing for long-term storage since there are no moving parts and the media doesn’t rely on magnetic particles that can drift (HD’s) or polymer substrates that degrade over time (CD\/DVD). So long as the ceramic coating doesn’t fade or easily scratch; ceramic storage could last longer than current methods. Immunity from EMP and other electronic attacks is another amazing advantage. One could easily see this used as a failsafe that can re-load literally hard-coded binary data such as firmware, an OS, or a secure bootstrap loader. If it is stable for a long period of time, it might be used for ultra-long term archives of massive amounts of data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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