#Some sort of stripped-down LTO could still hold well into the terabytes

[braillecortex]

so I hate to rain on the parade, I love a good disk as much as anyone, but this kind of thing has happened every few years for a long time now. For example, the Holographic Versatile Disk was proposed in 2003 with similarly high storage capacities:

Here's the source paper, unfortunately behind a paywall:

The type of technology they're using, with multiple layers in one disk, has been around for a a while also. It's used to a lesser extent in DVDs and Blu-Rays, with a current maximum of four layers for both formats.

Hitachi Maxell announced a Stacked Volumetric Optical Disk in 2006, with 100+ layers of storage space.

Now for the difficulties inherent to a product like this. First, recording to this disk makes use of a femtosecond pulse laser, not exactly a common component, or one that's easy to use.

The recording media is composed of something they call "Aggregation-induced emission dye-doped photoresist," an interesting way of doing things. Effectively, they have a solid layer of material that can be written to using a laser at any point in its 3-dimensional structure, and on an extremely small scale. However, as with so many optical technologies, it cannot be erased. This is write-once, read-many media, often abbreviated to WORM. That's one of the biggest difficulties with this kind of thing. Even the longest-running TV shows would have difficulty filling the quoted maximum storage of 1.6 petabytes. And then, of course, you run into the issue of mass-producing written disks. With A DVD or Blu-Ray, a "master" mold can be created and physically pressed into the recording medium, stamping out an entire completed disk all at once. With volumetric recording, no such master can be made. Each disk would have to be written to sequentially, dramatically increasing the time and space requirements of production. Even the paper itself only suggests applications in the datacenter space.

All this to say, it's unlikely this will be a consumer product any time soon. as much as I would love to keep 200tb in a dvd, it unfortunately seems to be restricted to research for now. There are limited applications of high capacity optical storage currently available in the enterprise world, however. For example, Sony makes a cartridge-based optical format that can store up to 5.5tb per cart:

But who knows? Maybe one day we'll all get back to carrying around those big zipper pouches filled with petabytes of media. All phones will have a PSP-style UMD player for tiny disks with mere terabytes of space. A future to strive for.

we're so back