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.
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
seeclick on the bigger number