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Scientists have developed an optical disc technology that they say can store at least 10 terabytes per disc with a lifetime of over 600-650 years:
"While optical technology can expand capacity, the most advanced optical discs developed so far have only 50-year lifespans," explained lead investigator Min Gu, a professor at RMIT and senior author of an open-access paper published in Nature Communications. "Our technique can create an optical disc with the largest capacity of any optical technology developed to date and our tests have shown it will last over half a millennium and is suitable for mass production of optical discs."
[...] The new nano-optical long-data memory technology is based on a novel gold nanoplasmonic hybrid glass matrix, unlike the materials used in current optical discs. The technique relies on a sol-gel process, which uses chemical precursors to produce ceramics and glass with higher purity and homogeneity than conventional processes. Glass is a highly durable material that can last up to 1000 years and can be used to hold data, but has limited native storage capacity because of its inflexibility. So the team combined glass with an organic material, halving its lifespan (to 600 years) but radically increasing its capacity.
Also at RMIT University.
High-capacity optical long data memory based on enhanced Young's modulus in nanoplasmonic hybrid glass composites (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03589-y) (DX)
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday March 29 2018, @01:01PM
I'd also forgotten about Archival Disc. When I went to look, none of the normal places I'd expect to sell it did, and the one place I found them charges $148 for a 1.5TB disc, so about $100/TB. For reference, that's the same price per TB as about 25 years of storage on Amazon Glacier ($0.004/GB). If you actually care about long-term storage then you're likely to want at least two copies in different locations and you're probably paying for a fire safe and so on, on top of that cost, so you could stick your data in cloud storage (where someone else is responsible for ensuring that it's geographically distributed) for at least 50 years for the cost of just the media and probably for over 100 years once you factor in the cost of the drive and of secure storage.
If you do want to do on-site offline backups, then it's not really competitive with LTO, where a 2.5TB cartridge costs $30 (i.e. a little over 10% of the cost per GB of AD) and is read-write, so you can cycle them for incremental backups and store them long-term for complete snapshots.
The only Archival Disc (which seems to be now called Optical Disc Archive) drive I found cost $5K. So let's assume that you want to store 200TB for 100 years. With AD, that's $5,000 for the drive, plus 134 discs at $148 each, so $24,832 in total (ignoring the cost of space for securely storing a fire safe and assuming a single copy). With Amazon Glacier, that's $960,000, so a lot more expensive now. With LTO-6, it looks to be about $2,000 for the drive and then $2,400 for the media, so $4,400 plus storage costs. For people with lots of data that they need to store for a long time, LTO is a lot cheaper than optical drives. For people with less data, cloud storage is cheaper.
As you say, there's unlikely to be another consumer optical drive format and that leads to big problems because optical storage R&D is really expensive and unless you can amortise the cost across large numbers of units then you're stuck producing incredibly expensive drives and discs, which can't compete against other technologies.
sudo mod me up