this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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That's the joke. The speed of a lot of these tech would require twice the time the data retention to write it.
We can place atoms in order on the head of this pin and store 30 Pb. Write speed? 1KB/min
Did you read the article? 30mbps is faster than a lot of people’s internets. It’s not fast, but for a prototype, it’s not bad.
You need to put the capacity into perspective with the storage speed. The comment I made simply highlighted the issue with an extreme example... For the reasoning provided. And as someone who's worked with emerging tech before... 30 Mbps is their ideal lap time in a lab environment. Do remember that 100 Mbps is considered absurdly slow for networking. 1Gbps sounds fast but even those transfer rates move into hours and days for larger file transfers.
This is explicitly stated to be for cold storage though. It doesn’t have to be fast at all. And they’re supposedly aiming for 500mbps soon.
They are at 30 presently. The "standard" is somewhere around 300-500 which, again, is acceptable for cold storage at the current tape drive size of 10-30tb.
There are minimums expected as density increases. Cold storage / backup still needs this to be viable.
I suppose it could be considered a trade-off? There’s the obvious advantages of longevity and possible size(?), it van still be viable in some niche uses where that matters. Github’s code vault from a while back could have benefited from that.
We are talking theoretical here, of course. For enterprise to even give it a realistic look it needs to outperform very time tested equipment so... Were probably looking at needing to beat on cost, capacity, speed... Or to put it simply its actual value / cost for implementation. Currently there are a few different research grade projects at various stages of lab testing... And this, like those, needs to fundamentally provide (noteworthy) gains over the existing and also be able to be consistent outside of the lab. Were a fair bit away from that yet.
I mentioned earlier that we are in dire need of meaningful, long term, non-magnetic storage... And I genuinely believe that. But while I can be interested in the tech - it still needs to be viewed with a critical eye until it can produce results.