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this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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It's "only" 125 TB. Still a lot, and impressive. But I just hate the stupid click baity 'petabit' term. We use bytes GB and TB as a standard, just use the standard term it's impressive enough.
But then the headline would have to say "Scientists Develop Optical Disc with measly 125TB's of Storage"
Exclamation marks usually help .... and comic sans
IMO the whole byte stuff is pretty confusing, people should have just sticked with bits, because that avoids implementation details.
One bit is the smallest amount of information. Bytes historically had different amounts of bits, depending on the architecture. With ASCII and the success of the 8 bit processor word of the Intel 8080/8085 processor, it is now defacto 8 Bit long.
But personally, byte seems a bit (no pun intended) like the imperial measurement system.
Gibibyte is the shit
Petabit/byte is not a buzz word.
We use bits, megabits, terabits, and petabits fairly standardly in tech.
That's not to be confused with bytes, megabytes, terabytes, and petabytes. Server farms will contain Petabytes (PB) of data.
Technically there's also exabit/byte, zettabit/byte, and yottabit/byte as we continue to climb the chain of technical capabilities. It's estimated that the internet overall has nearly 200 Zettabytes(ZB) of information in 2024.
I will refrain from using the word "standard", but when it comes to data storage the most common terminology is in bytes, as I said TB(terabytes), GB, etc. Saying Pb(petabits) isn't as common and gimmicky imo when referring to a new disk storage technology. 125 TB is impressive enough without having to throw the Peta in there.
Researchers and low level technology engineers tend to work in bits. I don't have access to the full journal publication to verify, but it's likely that the journal publication used that number and that the Gizmodo author/editor that choose the title just didn't bother converting it to more "consumer friendly" terms.
However, the author did boast that it would be "125,000,000 GB!". So I'm gonna go with that this was an AI written article and doesn't really know what a technology reader would actually prefer to see.
An LLM would absolutely know what the average reader would prefer to see, that’s kinda their whole schtick.
The average (non-technical) reader would prefer to ~~see~~ click on the bigger number
I don’t think there are any storage media that advertise their capacity in *bits though.
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it's not a buzzword, unless you produce a storage medium using it for some reason.
Then you ask questions.
I like to express my storage sizes in nibs. I think that makes this a 250 teranib disk.
Agreed. Bits are used more commonly when talking about transfer speeds, and bytes regarding storage.
I feel like I’ve seen bits used for storage on the scientific level since stuff like the pits and lands on a disc are expressed that way. To anyone in CS, you’d regard storage as a discrete whole part in some way. So bytes are fine. But when you’re developing storage, I believe you’d be concerned about bit density. Would need to read the paper though.
Sure, I did say commonly though. So for an article title in popular media you should probably use the common units to be as relatable as possible. But it's whatever. I guess doing it this way gets people talking, eh.
Bits are probably more useful when talking about specialized storage. Byte usually means 8 bits, but doesn't always need to, and not all data is stored in byte chunks.
A bit is the smallest piece of usable datum, so that makes sense when discussing this technology.
Sorry to be that guy, but in this context byte is strictly defined as 8 bits, never anything else. It's a strict definition in digital.
While I strongly agree with the idea behind your comment and gave you an upvote, at the physical layer it's not strictly true - especially for optical discs. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-to-fourteen_modulation for example.
That said, capacity listings should always be the capacity of the data that can be stored and retrieved as seen by the user, and that data would be in 8-bit bytes.
That’s not true either. Byte can be both powers of 10 and powers of 2. When talking about storage devices like hard drives etc. we usually refer to them in powers of 10, but OS’s usually do it in powers of 2. That’s why your hard drive looks smaller than advertised.
Bits are used for flash memory as individual chips. Assembled devices such as RAM and memory cards are advertised in bytes. I’m imagining that the same goes for hard drive platters and possibly disc media as well.
A byte in this context always means 8 bit though, it has nothing to do with powers of 10 or 2. The prefix of K (kilo), M (mega), G (giga) or Ki (kibi), Mi (mebi), Gi (gibi) doesn't change the meaning of "byte".
Yes this is right. There may be confusion happening with binary and metric prefixes.
For example:
Kibbibyte (1024 bytes) vs Kilobyte (1000 bytes).
Gigabytes, or gibibyte? Yes gibibyte is a thing.
As much as i hate to say it, but due to marketting fuckery the usage of byte has ruined it all as a 2TB drive is not 2 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 8 bits but instead 2 terabit ( 2*1000000000 )
Then comes the discussion if "1KB" is 1024 bytes or if 1000 bytes is a kilobyte. If you ask me, 1KB is 1024 bytes. If you ask the people using the kibibytes system, 1KB is 1000 bytes...
Shits fucking complex and fucked up. Cant go wrong if you say it in bits though
"gigibyte" is not a thing, but "gibibyte" is.
Gigibytes are what Gigi stores on her CDs.
My mistake, fixed it :)
It's the metric system and it's standard now. 1 kilobyte is 1000 bytes, just like 1 kilometer is 1000 meters. It is much easier to convert 20.415.823 bytes into megabytes - 23.4 MB.
Only windows insists on mislabeling the base 1024 kibibyte as kilobyte. The metric unit is much easier to use.
I never knew the whole thing was considered part of the metric system, makes sense though.
I love the metric system to death because its so simple and easy, and it links different measurements together ( 1l of water = 1kg etc ).
That said, a computer works differently and because we work in factors of 2, 1000 bytes being a kilobyte makes no sense once you start working with bits and low level stuff. Other than that, i can see why the stuff was redefined.
Also, i think linux also works in factors of 1024, but id need to check
There is nothing to keep you from using factors of 1024 (except he slightly ludicrous prefix "kibi" and "mebi"), but other than low level stuff like disc sectors or bios where you might want to use bit logic instead of division it's rather rare. I too started in the time when division op was more costly than bit level logic.
I'd argue that any user facing applications are better off with base 1000, except by convention. Like a majority of users don't know or care or need to care what bits or bytes do. It's programmers that like the beauty of the bit logic, not users. @mb_@lemm.ee
I agree with what you said, and its imo why the discussion of a factor of 1000 and 1024 will always rage on. Im a developer, and do embedded stuff in my free time. Everything around me is factor 1024 because of it, and i hate the factor 1000. But from a generic user standpoint, i agree its a lot more user friendly, as they are used to the metric system of a factor of 10
It is user friendly, and technically incorrect, since nothing ever lines up with reality when you use 1000 because the underlying system is base 8.
Or you get the weird non-sense all around "my computer has 18.8gb of memory"...
What? Every BIOS in the world still uses the same system. Same thing for me on Linux.
Only hard driver manufacturers used a different system to inflate their numbers and pushed a market campaign, a lot of people who didn't even use computers said "oh that makes sense - approved"
People who actually work with computer, memory, CPU, and other components in base 8 just ignores this non-sense of "x1000"
125 holy cow. drooling
I just want this disc in a DVD-RAM format.. It doesn't have to be extremely fast just readable and writable.. I used to love DVD-RAM until 4.25gb became nothing
Pb is still a standard measurement. While it's not very standard to use petabit instead of TB for data storage, it's still a recognized unit.
Yeah "standard" was a poorly chosen word. I meant common, as bytes are much more commonly used for disk storage.
8 bits in a byte, networks are measured in bits.
Data is stored in bytes (as the minimum size), it's moved as a bitstream (continuous flow, without regard to individual byte boarders).
Hence storage is measured in bytes, network connections are measured in bits/second.
Are disks though?
I think the last time I saw storage measured in bits was a SNES cartridge.
I think the N64 measured cart sizes in bits too
They're not even, they're measured in bits per second. That's like saying temperature is measured in calories.
We are talking about the size of a unit of data, not how much time elapses for whatever you're talking about.
There are 8 bits in a byte, regardless if you're talking about 1Mbps or 1MB/s of transfer speed calculation.
Storage are measured in bytes because data are stored in that form, with an individual bit being meaningless but a single byte often being significant. Network throughputs are measured in bits per second because the time-density of data is the significant thing there, not the total number of bytes transmitted.
There are 8 bits in a byte and there are 9 degrees Rankine in every 5 degrees Celsius, but if I told you the temperature for tomorrow in degrees Rankine, you would still think me weird for saying it that way and you might wonder what I was hiding.
There are almost always dozens of units we could use to describe something, but it's okay to call it out when someone says something unusually as the original headline did.
I never claimed disks should be measured in bytes... And still with this per second thing which has no bearing on this. How data is stored is irrelevant to how it's measured in transit. That's kind of like saying kilometers are measured in kilometers per hour, but a drag strip is a quarter mile. So you've lost me on whatever point you're trying to make there.
The original comment in this thread was about how the article lists the capacity of this experimental disk in bits, and posited that bytes are the usual unit to use.
The next comment was about how networks are measured in bits.
So my replies since then have been about two points, first that bits are still inappropriate to use here even if networks use them, and second that networks use bits per second, which is a different unit than bits.
It's more like saying speed is measured in kilometers per hour rather than kilometers (point 2) while also saying that the country we're talking about measures distance in miles usually (point 1).