[HN Gopher] Holographic ribbon aims to oust magnetic tape with 5...
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Holographic ribbon aims to oust magnetic tape with 50-year life
span and 200TB
Author : freddier
Score : 22 points
Date : 2025-07-13 19:58 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| allears wrote:
| Sounds really good, but neither the article nor any information I
| could find on the company says anything about read/write speed
| compared to other options. I would think that would be a big
| factor when you're dealing with that much data.
| duskwuff wrote:
| 1) What on earth do they mean by "zero energy storage"? Magnetic
| tape doesn't consume energy at idle either. Hell, even hard disks
| can be powered down.
|
| 2) "Also, the optical-based new tech's touted 50-year life is 10x
| the life of magnetic tape." Say what? Most magnetic tape is rated
| for up to 30 years in storage. You might only get a few years out
| of a tape if you're writing to it frequently... but this new
| format is write-once, so it's not even in the running.
|
| 3) People have made wild claims about holographic data storage
| being the Next Big Thing since the 1980s - in particular, there
| was a whole wave of them in the late 2000s claiming to have a DVD
| replacement under development. None of them have brought products
| to market. I'm not confident this one's going to be any
| different.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > What on earth do they mean by "zero energy storage"?
|
| My guess is that someone from marketing came up with that
| bullet point, and the company's actual engineers are torn
| between eye-rolling and wanting to get very violent on the
| marketing person.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Guess: magnetic memory exists in a high state of potential
| energy. This facilitates its degradation. While, say, scratches
| in stone are lower potential energy?
| duskwuff wrote:
| That's a clever theory, but the company specifically
| described it as having "zero energy storage _costs_ ".
| catwhatcat wrote:
| What are the chances this becomes a desktop form-factor alike cd
| drives?
| duskwuff wrote:
| Zero. There's no market for consumer archival-only storage;
| magnetic tape has been an enterprise-only product for 20+
| years. Even write-once formats are barely holding on;
| recordable Blu-Ray production ended earlier this year.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > recordable Blu-Ray production ended earlier this year
|
| It looks like it's only Sony that's ending production?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Anyone know the history of long-term reliance on proprietary
| technologies?
|
| I.e., how often does it actually work out for the adopters?
|
| Are their licensing / escrow schemes the meant to mitigate the
| risks from the original supplier going out of business? How often
| do those schemes pay off?
| jug wrote:
| I wish we had something better than "walk through multiple hard
| drives as a data nomad and remember to use them every now and
| then" as a cost-effective and consumer oriented method for cold
| storage. I don't even care for the speed. Tape is obnoxious with
| high up front investments, not even targeting private use, Blu-
| ray never really became a surefire way and there were too much
| uncertainty and variety depending on brand.
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