If it's slow, then it's the central backup and you use anything else for regular use. Just having it as a fallback for recovery would be huge.

That’s cheap enough a small business could do long term backups for individuals and other small businesses.

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

Manipulating the atoms in a crystal to store info is extremely high-precision, as is verifying the accuracy of the write). So is reading positions down to a few nanometers, But consumers wouldn't need a $6000 reader to get, say, 10GB dumped to a hard drive ... you'd carry your crystal and 16GB drive down to the corner store and user their reader to dump sector 37BJ to the drive. No need to trust them with your platter ... but are you exposing all 360TB to potential damage from the machine?

So it's 2 to 3 percent of original estimate? That means it'll last anywhere from 280 to 420 million years. Dead on arrival tech.

How can you be so sure they haven't already done durability testing??

The ones with metal pigment are still waiting to fail, the ones that died used a cheap organic dye, coz profit. This is Silica (i.e. quartz, a long lived rock) with variances in polarization and intensity,( hence 5D when combined with a 3D Crystal))

OK generic marketing crap and will you have their special reader in a century, but it's a solid way to project knowledge into the far future (gotta wonder if we need to re-examine some quartz crystals with this in mind ;}

Giant worm that shits mind enhancing drug, to be more specific

What if some civilization in the past already had something like this, and there are 'plates' or pieces of rock out there (under sand dunes? written in the sides of those vases from ancient Egypt?)

Could they make portable readers that can at least spot old pottery chunks that are probably FULL of videos?

At least give them to the nations which aren't currently trying to ignore and undo the last 100 years of medicine, physics, and biology. (Sorry, United States.)

Once you have the tech fully worked out, the budget to make them is going to be cheaper. Easier for all nations to get their own

if they were reasonable, they wouldn't be a ruling "class"

Remember Memristors? They're commercially available today, at 200 EUR per bit.

Nor ever will

Those aliens from the future will be so amazed when they find a disc with 360 TB of cat videos.

Is anything, really?

Not even cats are safe from cats.

For real, what am I going to do when the sun swallows the earth in 4 billion years?

It's not strength, but rotation. Shoot a photon at the cube at a certain spot, you get data out of it. Hit the same spot in the cube with light that is polarized perpendicular to the first, and you get different data out of it.

Er... that's what it sounds like, anyway...

5D is the wrong term, the correct term is multiplex.

Skyrim Silica Crystal Edition

Sauce? Or sarcasm?

Totally. This is the data equivalent of a “new battery tech will revolutionise your phone” post.

Not the business plan. This will be used as an archiving service for $$$.

When a post is a link to an article, I would prefer that the post title match the article. Many news communities actually require that.

This is the type of thing that would be used for storage of essential human data rather than for general data backups I think

If a glass platter really holds 360TB and can be made affordable, it wouldn't really matter.

The article says itis designed for cold storage of data, e.g. backups, or perhaps things that get written once and accessed infrequently. 

"Statistics show that between 60 to 80 percent of all data which is currently stored globally is classed as cold data," said Kazansky. "However, because of the way that humanity is developing, because of all of the budgets and AI and so on and so forth, a lot of businesses historically have been like, 'look, we are just going to use hard disk drives or SSDs,' which are expensive, which are bad for the environment because they consume a lot of energy. They're non-recyclable. They fail often, but they're just easier to use. Through inertia, people have been using the incorrect type of tool for a use case that can be used with a different tool."