Floppy Farewell

As demand for data storage grows exponentially, engineers are developing higher-capacity storage devices. Currently, the largest capacity hard disk drive (HDD) used by data centers for cloud service is the 30-terabyte (TB) Exos X Mozaic 3+ developed by Seagate Technology. That HDD can store over three million photos with a file size of 10 megabytes.

Chinese engineers reportedly developed an optical disk with a capacity of 1.6 petabits (PB). A petabit is equivalent to 125 TB of data, or the combined storage capacity of about 15,000 DVDs, according to Live Science.

The 1.6PB 3D nanoscale optical disk memory can store 20 million photos of 10MB each, Nature reports. For comparison, a dual-layer Blu-Ray disk, the largest optical disk format available to consumers, has a 50 gigabyte (GB) capacity and can store only 5,000 photos, according to PetaPixel.

Japanese engineers are also trying to develop a 30TB HDD to improve their 18TB MG09, the largest capacity HDD they have developed so far.

Ironically, as everyone is already using TB-level data storage nowadays, many Japanese are still using an outmoded storage device.

It was only last month that the Japanese government scrapped 1,000 regulations requiring soft copy documents to be submitted on a floppy disk. Digital Minister Taro Kono took three years to end its use. He started in 2021 his campaign to get rid of old technology in public offices, including fax machines, BBC reports.

The square-shaped floppy disk developed in the 1960s can store only up to 1.44 megabytes of data and fell out of fashion in the 1990s as larger capacity storage devices were invented, like the 32GB memory stick. Data stored in more than 22,000 floppy disks can fit in one 32GB memory stick.

Sony, the last manufacturer of floppy disks, ended production of the storage device in 2011 but it remained in use because of regulations, according to BBC.