Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes.

Demonstrating this stuff is possible isn't the hard part, it seems. Productionizing it is. You have to have exceedingly fast read and write speeds: who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it, or if you produce data faster than you can write it? It has to be durable under adverse conditions. It has to be practical to manufacture the medium and the drives. You probably don't want to have to need a separate device to read and a device to write. By the time most of these problems are worked out, most of these technologies aren't a whole lot better than existing tech.

Stick this on the "Wouldn't it be nice if graphene..." pile.

> who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it

To be fair, if I'm reading an exabyte in a month, my hardware's pushing >3 Tbps, which I'd be very happy with.

Basically you just ignore the hyped up press releases, this just accompanies most semi-cool/exciting papers. The scientists probably know this isn't going to be some new storage that will become widespread but its just part of the game to sell the story like this and the administration wants this.

> You probably don't want to have to need a separate device to read and a device to write.

I don’t think this would bother the average enterprise in the least. We used to have entire rooms dedicated to tape libraries that housed dozens of tape drives and thousands of tapes each.

The read and write speed are absolutely critical but having to utilize multiple devices isn’t anything new at all.

The fact that most of the world's data is still stored on little spinny disks, considering how many times in the last 40 years we've seen this story, is criminal.

Aren't lasers driving the current 32TB+ HDD tech?