Researchers created a device with capacity of up to 1.6 petabits with a DVD area | Hacker News Reader

Researchers created a device with capacity of up to 1.6 petabits with a DVD area

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Can't wait for this to be exactly like every other massive capacity optical disc technology that I've read about over the past 20 years and never come out. Will there ever be anything larger than the 100gb? 128gb? BDXL discs? I wish.

You mean 200 terabytes.

This usage of bits over bytes, to make the number go higher and therefore sound better, has always been a big issue with speed measurements of network hardware, and I would like not to see the same misleading pattern used in headlines for references to storage media, which has always used bytes (1000 vs 1024 notwithstanding).

I'm not sure why they'd bother, 200TB is extremely impressive on its own. I just wish these would be a real thing that I could really buy one day.

I guess being able to use petabytes as a unit was important to them. And ditto. Even if it's write-only, I have tons of data (i.e. disk images of childhood computers) that I would love to preserve forever, but don't currently have the disk space to store.

But that's the issue: they aren't using petabytes as a unit, they are using petabits

sorry I was more referring to the peta- prefix, the bytes/bits thing is exactly why I'm upset about this. They shouldn't have inflated the figure to bits just so they could put peta in front of it. This is a 200TB storage medium. It shouldn't ever be called peta-anything.

I have never seen, and hope to never see again, the unit of 'petabit' used in a capacity context.

I think they're trying to inflate the size of the number to make it look more impressive, just like how network speeds are measured in bits for the same reason. This is not and never has been a thing for storage devices however. I think they just want to use the peta- prefix.

Yes certainly that’s why but it’s insulting

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