What a useless headline. God forbid they just give the actual capacity rather than some abstract, bullshit, flexible measure that means nothing to anyone.
I especially like it when they use airplanes to illustrate weight. “… the same as 15 Boeing 747 jumbo jets”. Airplanes are made to be as light as possible, they go to extreme lengths to save as much weight as they can. As such, a 747 is much lighter than most objects of similar size. People have no intuition of the weight of such large objects to begin with, but then they add to it by using something that is much lighter than you’d expect.
Asteroid the size of 64 Canada geese to pass Earth Tuesday - NASA
I’m not even making this up …
The US really will do anything to avoid using metric lol
200TB
Woah, I can’t wait to never afford that!
So like, 5-6 uncompressed 4k movies
They have to make it as accessible a headline as possible, especially when most don’t read past the headline anyway these days. The average person probably doesn’t have much of an idea as to what 125TB looks like in real world use.
I’d argue that most people would have a better idea of what 125TB looks like than knowing the size of a 4k movie file, let alone 14,000 of them. They can at least compare 125TB to their 500GB/1TB phone/computer storage.
Not to mention there’s nearly 10x difference in bitrate between 4K streaming video and actual 4K HDR off a bluray. The only people who know how big a 4K video is these days are nerds and pirates, because it’s not like Netflix tells you.
1.4Pb (~175TB), the quoted number of movies is based on a 14GB movie which is very small (most BluRay disks hold somewhere between 25 and 50GB) and no discussion about write speed, so basically this is cool research that someone has done and is no closer to a commercial product that any of the dozens of other articles that have come out on this topic in the last 15 years
I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn’t storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don’t grow on trees, you know?
It’s still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We’ll see where or if they resurface next, but I’m pretty sure we’re not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.
Streaming services definitely don’t give you full quality files. They’re compressed to save bandwidth. Netflix only uses about 7GB per hour in 4k. That’s about the exact size of the higher quality 1080p movies I download.
It’s usually less than 7gb per hour, it ranges from 2 to 7GB, it adjusts butrate on the fly. Netflix quality sucks.
Edit: realized I typed butrate instead of bitrate, it fits, so I’m leaving it.
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I wonder what the longevity of one of these discs is? The article says they can be manufactured in regular DVD production facilities, so it probably depends on the material used (which I think can range).
If they could combine something close to this data capacity level with the M-DISC standard (which supposedly last for about 1,000 years once you take into account the organic ingredients) that would be fantastic.
New optical-disks able to hold a shit ton more storage sounds cool, until you realize you probably ain’t gonna be seeing widespread adoption of it among the general public due to cloud storage and things like that, so if it ever does become publicly available it’ll cost way too much.
Cloud storage is just someone else’s computer. That someone else is who the target market for something like this is. Server farms need a lot of storage, and that takes up space. Optical storage of that capacity is great for data you need to read often, which is the vast majority of data on servers.
