Note: Unfortunately the research paper linked in the article is a dead/broken/wrong link. Perhaps the author will update it later.
From the limited coverage, it doesn’t sound like there’s an actual optical drive that utilizes this yet and that it’s just theoretical based on the properties of the material the researchers developed.
I’m not holding my breath, but I would absolutely love to be able to back up my storage system to a single optical disc (even if tens of TBs go unused).
If they could make a R/W version of that, holy crap.
It’s “only” 125 TB. Still a lot, and impressive. But I just hate the stupid click baity ‘petabit’ term. We use bytes GB and TB as a standard, just use the standard term it’s impressive enough.
But then the headline would have to say “Scientists Develop Optical Disc with measly 125TB’s of Storage”
IMO the whole byte stuff is pretty confusing, people should have just sticked with bits, because that avoids implementation details.
One bit is the smallest amount of information. Bytes historically had different amounts of bits, depending on the architecture. With ASCII and the success of the 8 bit processor word of the Intel 8080/8085 processor, it is now defacto 8 Bit long.
But personally, byte seems a bit (no pun intended) like the imperial measurement system.
Agreed. Bits are used more commonly when talking about transfer speeds, and bytes regarding storage.
I feel like I’ve seen bits used for storage on the scientific level since stuff like the pits and lands on a disc are expressed that way. To anyone in CS, you’d regard storage as a discrete whole part in some way. So bytes are fine. But when you’re developing storage, I believe you’d be concerned about bit density. Would need to read the paper though.
Are disks though?
I think the last time I saw storage measured in bits was a SNES cartridge.
They’re not even, they’re measured in bits per second. That’s like saying temperature is measured in calories.
We are talking about the size of a unit of data, not how much time elapses for whatever you’re talking about.
There are 8 bits in a byte, regardless if you’re talking about 1Mbps or 1MB/s of transfer speed calculation.
Pb is still a standard measurement. While it’s not very standard to use petabit instead of TB for data storage, it’s still a recognized unit.
Gigabytes, or gibibyte? Yes gibibyte is a thing.
As much as i hate to say it, but due to marketting fuckery the usage of byte has ruined it all as a 2TB drive is not 2 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 8 bits but instead 2 terabit ( 2*1000000000 )
Then comes the discussion if “1KB” is 1024 bytes or if 1000 bytes is a kilobyte. If you ask me, 1KB is 1024 bytes. If you ask the people using the kibibytes system, 1KB is 1000 bytes…
Shits fucking complex and fucked up. Cant go wrong if you say it in bits though
Then comes the discussion if “1KB” is 1024 bytes or if 1000 bytes is a kilobyte.
It’s the metric system and it’s standard now. 1 kilobyte is 1000 bytes, just like 1 kilometer is 1000 meters. It is much easier to convert 20.415.823 bytes into megabytes - 23.4 MB.
Only windows insists on mislabeling the base 1024 kibibyte as kilobyte. The metric unit is much easier to use.
I never knew the whole thing was considered part of the metric system, makes sense though.
I love the metric system to death because its so simple and easy, and it links different measurements together ( 1l of water = 1kg etc ).
That said, a computer works differently and because we work in factors of 2, 1000 bytes being a kilobyte makes no sense once you start working with bits and low level stuff. Other than that, i can see why the stuff was redefined.
Also, i think linux also works in factors of 1024, but id need to check
What? Every BIOS in the world still uses the same system. Same thing for me on Linux.
Only hard driver manufacturers used a different system to inflate their numbers and pushed a market campaign, a lot of people who didn’t even use computers said “oh that makes sense - approved”
People who actually work with computer, memory, CPU, and other components in base 8 just ignores this non-sense of “x1000”
Petabit/byte is not a buzz word.
We use bits, megabits, terabits, and petabits fairly standardly in tech.
That’s not to be confused with bytes, megabytes, terabytes, and petabytes. Server farms will contain Petabytes (PB) of data.
Technically there’s also exabit/byte, zettabit/byte, and yottabit/byte as we continue to climb the chain of technical capabilities. It’s estimated that the internet overall has nearly 200 Zettabytes(ZB) of information in 2024.
I will refrain from using the word “standard”, but when it comes to data storage the most common terminology is in bytes, as I said TB(terabytes), GB, etc. Saying Pb(petabits) isn’t as common and gimmicky imo when referring to a new disk storage technology. 125 TB is impressive enough without having to throw the Peta in there.
Researchers and low level technology engineers tend to work in bits. I don’t have access to the full journal publication to verify, but it’s likely that the journal publication used that number and that the Gizmodo author/editor that choose the title just didn’t bother converting it to more “consumer friendly” terms.
However, the author did boast that it would be “125,000,000 GB!”. So I’m gonna go with that this was an AI written article and doesn’t really know what a technology reader would actually prefer to see.
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Bits are probably more useful when talking about specialized storage. Byte usually means 8 bits, but doesn’t always need to, and not all data is stored in byte chunks.
A bit is the smallest piece of usable datum, so that makes sense when discussing this technology.
Sorry to be that guy, but in this context byte is strictly defined as 8 bits, never anything else. It’s a strict definition in digital.
While I strongly agree with the idea behind your comment and gave you an upvote, at the physical layer it’s not strictly true - especially for optical discs. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-to-fourteen_modulation for example.
That said, capacity listings should always be the capacity of the data that can be stored and retrieved as seen by the user, and that data would be in 8-bit bytes.
That’s not true either. Byte can be both powers of 10 and powers of 2. When talking about storage devices like hard drives etc. we usually refer to them in powers of 10, but OS’s usually do it in powers of 2. That’s why your hard drive looks smaller than advertised.
Bits are used for flash memory as individual chips. Assembled devices such as RAM and memory cards are advertised in bytes. I’m imagining that the same goes for hard drive platters and possibly disc media as well.
I’m already ready to buy the 32K ultra extended directors cut of the LOTR with this news.
We’re almost there…
The wet dream of all the people who pirate. This and crystal storage.
I so wish we had some affordable, high-density storage technology that we could record and then forget it in the attic for 20 years.
I mean there’s magnetic tape. It’s not, like, usable. But it’s also none too volatile if stored properly.
