The invention belongs to Cerabyte company. Its drivers will be They are miniature in terms of their physical dimensions, protected from extreme effects, and quite voluminous in terms of the information they can store.. By comparison, a Cerabyte drive records data at a density of 1 terabyte per square centimeter, while today’s hard drives achieve only 0.02 terabytes per square centimeter (some future models will offer 0.1 terabytes by the end of the decade).

What is known

Technology is based on usage ceramic materials. The inventors propose recording data on inorganic layers 50 to 100 atoms thick, protected by ceramic sputtering. Recording and reading of information is carried out using a directed stream of particles (for example, a laser).

Cerabyte experts create two types of drivers:

• A multilayered glass plate with a thickness of 100 to 300 micrometers,
• Single layer tape, 5 micrometer thick, with a 10 micrometer ceramic coating on both sides.

By increasing the number of drives in the system, you can create a storage area containing the amount of data you want. The density of information storage is approximately ten times greater than modern drives.

A short video presentation of the new technology: video

Cons

This invention is not without its disadvantages. Writing and reading data is extremely slow; sometimes the delay reaches several seconds.

Due to the complex design of the storage device, it will be difficult for the reading device to reach the desired cell, since its position in the volumetric array must be determined.

Such limitations exclude the use of these drives on user devices and servers, but they can find applications for creating archives in which huge amounts of data are stored, access of which does not require high speed.

Due to the use of glass and ceramics as protection, these archives will be resistant to power surges, floods, fires, earthquakes and explosions.

plans

The first generation of the technology is expected to be released in 2025 with an initial capacity of 10 petabytes (i.e. 10,000 terabytes) as a rack rather than a cartridge. By the end of the decade, the volume will reach 100 petabytes. In addition, Cerabyte plans to launch CeraTape racks with a capacity of one billion gigabytes, which it says will be in the form of 5-micrometer-thick tapes coated with a 10-nanometer ceramic coating.

It is stated that this proposal will be as follows: “Ideal candidate for cold storage, lifetime cloud storage and unlimited cloud storage”. However, read/write speeds remain problematic.

The price is not yet known, but the company says it is not high. Additionally, the device promises “zero standby power consumption.”