Cerabyte is about to shake up the world of data storage with its ultra-thin ceramic technology that promises storage capacities like never before.
The revolution in data storage is already underway, and this time the protagonist is ceramics. Cerabyte, a startup based in Munich, Germany, is about to change the way vast amounts of information is stored.
They have developed an innovative technology that uses ceramic instead of traditional storage methods such as holography, in DNA sequences or silica.
The ceramic, in the form of very thin layers of only 50 atoms, is arranged in sheets that can measure up to 300 micrometers thick. The amazing thing about this technology is its ability to write and read data at astonishing speeds of gigabytes per second (GBps).
To put that in perspective, today’s hard drives achieve a density of just 0.02 terabytes per square centimeter (TB/cm^2), and future models will reach approximately 0.1 TB/cm^2. Even tape, used in LTO cartridges, lags behind at 0.006 TB/cm^2. With this novelty things change a lot.
The end of the hard drive era? This German startup is also preparing for the launch of 1 exabyte cartridges
The first generation of Cerabyte cartridges it is scheduled for launch in 2025 with an initial capacity of 10 petabytes (10,000 terabytes), which is expected to grow to 100 petabytes by the end of the decade.
But that’s not all, as the company plans to release a 1 exabyte (1,000,000,000 gigabyte) CeraTape in the future, which comes as tapes just 5 micrometers thick coated with a thin 10-nanometer-thick ceramic layer.
Despite its impressive capacity, Cerabyte still faces a few issues in terms of read and write speeds. Although data can be accessed in a matter of seconds, a transfer speed of 10 GB/s (gigabytes per second) is equivalent to filling a cartridge in more than 11 days.
cerabyte
This might not be an issue for cold storage (simply put, it’s data that’s still important to keep, but you don’t need to access it all the time), lifetime cloud storage, and unlimited cloud storage, although it’s still being an area for improvement.
Cerabyte intends to primarily sell its innovative product to hyperscalers (large providers of cloud services, such as computing and storage, to enterprises), and data center operators. Although the price is still unknown, the company claims that its product it will be a low cost solution compared to current alternatives.
Total market is expected to reach $500 billion by 2030which means six times more growth than in 2023. In addition, Cerabyte promises a reduction in total cost of ownership of up to 75% thanks to idle power consumption and high data density.