Western Digital bets on ceramic nanolayer tech for ultra-durable storage

[Alfonso Maruccia]

The big picture: Cerabyte and Western Digital have formed a strategic partnership to accelerate the development of ceramic-based storage solutions. Cerabyte has spent years refining its long-term storage technology and will likely use Western Digital's backing to bring its ambitious concept closer to a consumer-ready product.

As more data is archived digitally, the inherent fragility of bits remains a pressing issue. The answer may lie in ceramics. Western Digital has invested in Cerabyte, a company developing a groundbreaking storage technology designed to preserve data reliably for millennia.

Cerabyte's technology stores digital data on ceramic nanolayers, using lasers to etch QR code-like matrices representing bits. Ceramics, known for their resistance to corrosion and extreme heat, have endured for millennia. The German startup claims its storage method could preserve digital data for over 5,000 years.

Cerabyte recently demonstrated its technology's durability by heating a prototype storage medium to 250°C in an oven. Both the medium and the archived data emerged unscathed. The company stated its ceramic-based solution could meet the rising demand for long-term data storage platforms.

While Cerabyte still needs to prove it can bring a new storage medium to market, Western Digital remains a dominant force in the storage industry as one of the world's largest hard disk drive manufacturers. Magnetic-based media like HDDs are theoretically prone to bit rot over time, making long-term durability a chief concern.

Western Digital Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer Shantnu Sharma said the company backed Cerabyte because both share a focus on long-term storage innovation. Cerabyte claims its ceramics are affordable, sustainable, and resistant to bit rot. The medium also requires no ongoing maintenance or additional energy once data is etched.

"We are excited to be working with Western Digital to define a technology partnership, fueling our ability to deliver accessible permanent storage solutions at scale," Cerabyte co-founder and CEO Christian Pflaum said.

Cerabyte has yet to specify a timeline for bringing the technology to market, leaving its debut uncertain. However, the partnership highlights the growing momentum behind alternative storage solutions. As the demand for long-term data preservation rises, innovative technologies like Cerabyte's could redefine the future of digital archiving.

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Western Digital bets on ceramic nanolayer tech for ultra-durable storage

 

[bclaymiles]

Watching the video, I'm struck by their use of the back-and-forth writing/access. Struck because it seems that it would be dramatically more efficient to use...hmm, I wonder, perhaps something that's maybe...circular in shape, you know, flat but with hole in the middle, so that it could...I dunno, maybe spin? And then the writing/access can be continuous rather than stop start run stop start run. I think there are existing technologies that use a spinning medium, I can't remember their names though. Hard...draves? or maybe it's CD-Rims? It's on the tip of my tongue...

 

[New Day]

Watching the video, I'm struck by their use of the back-and-forth writing/access. Struck because it seems that it would be dramatically more efficient to use...hmm, I wonder, perhaps something that's maybe...circular in shape, you know, flat but with hole in the middle, so that it could...I dunno, maybe spin? And then the writing/access can be continuous rather than stop start run stop start run. I think there are existing technologies that use a spinning medium, I can't remember their names though. Hard...draves? or maybe it's CD-Rims? It's on the tip of my tongue...

It reads the data on the swipe back....but how about the write check following the writing?

 

[bclaymiles]

It reads the data on the swipe back....but how about the write check following the writing?

Can still be done just as easily - more easily - on a spinning medium. The latency from stop/start/stop/start has got to be crushing. True, for archival storage, latency isn't an overwhelming issue, but the inertia that has to be overcome with a 'raking' method like this is senseless.

 

[hwertz]

@bclaymiles Spot on. I had the same thought, you'd probably want to go to a disc. It'd then be like a modern version of a CD-R (but instead of just discoloring some dye it's actually etching into the material.) But, you know, this is a prototype just showing the technology is working.

That said, they say in this design it's writing in one direction, and reading it back in the other (to check it was written properly); on readback it does read in both directions. So it's at least not just moving it back while doing nothing. But I'd have to agree with you, it seems like jerking this platform back and forth 1000s or even millions of times would cause some wear eventually compared to just spinning up a disc and read/writing it.

Pretty sweet though if they get it working (either in disc or the square format.) I have like 25TB of storage at home (no, I didn't spend absurd money on it, the 18TB drive was like $250, a rather old 4TB external, HDDs are extremely cheaper than SSD pricing is all I've got to say on that one). But I'd be perfectly happy putting some of that data onto some data slabs and keep them in a drawer.

 

[whawn]

The advantage to the back and forth seems to me to be even density -- on a CD disk, the data near the center is packed tightly; a bit-length is less than 1/2 what it is at the outer edge. This design uses qr-type codes, for robustness, I suppose, which would be more difficult to implement on a disc. In the future, I suspect, they hope to go to a wider raster sort of thing, maybe with many laser reader/writer heads arrayed, leaving the mechanical back and forth behind. The big problem, I think is mechanical complexity and obsolescence. We have tape, for example, from Apollo missions that was not usable because the machines to read it were no longer made and those on hand were broken. OTOH, we still have recognizable recordings from Edison's first recording work, because the mechanics were simple enough to be easily duplicated.

 

[New Day]

The advantage to the back and forth seems to me to be even density -- on a CD disk, the data near the center is packed tightly; a bit-length is less than 1/2 what it is at the outer edge. This design uses qr-type codes, for robustness, I suppose, which would be more difficult to implement on a disc. In the future, I suspect, they hope to go to a wider raster sort of thing, maybe with many laser reader/writer heads arrayed, leaving the mechanical back and forth behind. The big problem, I think is mechanical complexity and obsolescence. We have tape, for example, from Apollo missions that was not usable because the machines to read it were no longer made and those on hand were broken. OTOH, we still have recognizable recordings from Edison's first recording work, because the mechanics were simple enough to be easily duplicated.

I wanna know what happned to the shake (and bake) drives I read about in some materials science magazine over twenty years ago.