But then the headline would have to say "Scientists Develop Optical Disc with measly 125TB's of Storage"

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.

I like to express my storage sizes in nibs. I think that makes this a 250 teranib disk.

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.

Agreed. Bits are used more commonly when talking about transfer speeds, and bytes regarding storage.

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

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.

125 holy cow. drooling

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.

8 bits in a byte, networks are measured in bits.

Lol, I feel like it'd still be a multi-disc set.

Let me guess, you'll watch it on your 720p TV? /s

I mean there's magnetic tape. It's not, like, usable. But it's also none too volatile if stored properly.

I could see it easily replacing tape libraries as backup devices in data centers. Without the economies of scale like we saw with DVD-RW, I doubt I'd be able to afford one until they hit the secondhand market. It would also be interesting to see something like that integrated into storage appliances which would let you have something approaching an on-prem version of Amazon's Glacier tier.

Wouldn’t Backblaze be a solution for you?

A big part of the problem is that most consumers don't want to own things either. Subscriptions are exactly what too many people want.

It would make physical sharing of data a lot more efficient instead of the old stack of floppy disks we carried around in the old days.

This is more for bulk data storage than home media.