Cerabyte Startup Plans 10,000TB Data Cartridges

Cerabyte startup plans 10,000TB data cartridges with popular and well-known materials that are used in restrooms. That said, ceramic may just get to displace holographic, DNA, and Silica as the next big thing and story in exotic storage.

Cerabyte Startup 10,000TB Data Cartridges

Cerabyte Startup 10,000TB Data Cartridges

Are you looking to store your 16K video footage on something sturdy? Here is a candidate. Cerabyte, which for those that don’t know is a data storage firm that is based in Munich, Germany, has just published an excerpt of a presentation that Christian Pflaum, its CEO and co-founder, will reveal at the upcoming 2023 Storage Developer Conference that is stipulated to take place in California.

And as alluded by its name, Cerabyte makes use of a special type of ceramics that is arranged in layers as little as 50 atoms thick in sheets of up to 300µm thick. Making use of a laser or particle beam, they have reportedly been able to write and read data at Gbps speeds with the media in question capable of supporting TB/cm^2 areal densities.

In contrast, current hard disk drives get to only 0.02TB/cm^2 with future models on the other hand very much likely to be launched towards the end of the decade thus reaching about 0.1TB/cm^2; Tape – as utilized in LTO cartridges – tops 0.006TB//cm^2 (or 317Gb/in^2).

The First Generation Cartridges Launch Date

The first generation cartridges as you should know are expected to be launched in the year 2025 with an initial capacity of 10PB (that 10,000TB) thus rising to 100PB by the end of the decade. And beyond this, Cerabyte on the other hand plans to introduce a 1EB (that one billion Gigabytes) CeraTape, which it has stated, will take the shape of 5µm-thick ribbons that are coated with a 10nm thick ceramic coating.

Pflaum has mentioned that the data will be accessible within a couple of seconds, thus making it the right and perfect candidate for cold storage, lifetime cloud storage, and even unlimited cloud storage. Read/write speeds on the other hand, however, remain problematic as a 10GB/s transfer speed equates to only 36TB per hour which means that you will be needing over 11 days to fill a single cartridge.

Who Will Cerabyte Sell Its Products To

And while there is an appetite for such a product amongst consumers, Cerabyte in question will sell them primarily to hyperscalers, enterprises as well as data center operators with a total addressable market quite expected to get to 500 billion dollars by 2030, which is a six-fold increase in contrast to 2023. The startup promises a reduction in TCO of up to 75% all thanks to zero power consumption at rest and extremely high volumetric data density on the other hand.

What Are Ceramics and What You Need To Know About Them

Ceramics for those that don’t know are hard-wearing which simply means that they can be used under extreme conditions, such as low/high temperatures. We really don’t know whether it will get to come with a separate drive or if the reading/writing mechanism on the other hand and the media will be integrated for a reported better performance.

Another unknown here with the whole thing is the price although Cerabyte has stated that its flagship product will be a low-cost solution. LTO-8 tapes as you should know cost around $4 per TB and if it is that Cerabyte matches that, its 10PB storage cartridge in question should fetch a cool $40,000, which is quite a bargain for those in the know.

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