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.
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.
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.
