Note: Unfortunately the research paper linked in the article is a dead/broken/wrong link. Perhaps the author will update it later.
From the limited coverage, it doesn’t sound like there’s an actual optical drive that utilizes this yet and that it’s just theoretical based on the properties of the material the researchers developed.
I’m not holding my breath, but I would absolutely love to be able to back up my storage system to a single optical disc (even if tens of TBs go unused).
If they could make a R/W version of that, holy crap.
Research is one thing, getting from concept to production is another. There was a lot of hype about holographic disc formats years ago that was promising capacities from 100 GB to several TBs but they never actually made it to the market.
With the ongoing “death” of physical media playing out in the consumer space, it will also probably be hard for these esoteric disc formats to attract the investment needed to develop them. There might be some enterprise interest if the tech is stable enough for archival use I suppose.
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.
Graphene PCs too.