This thing is called a 5D optical data storage crystal. It's a little piece of fused quartz, etched to remarkable precision using a femtosecond ultraviolet laser.
The "5D" part of the name is just a marketing gimmick (it only has three dimensions, obviously), but it's impressive anyway. Using current technology, these little things can store 360 terabytes of data. Once written, these crystals can survive temperatures up to 1000°C, and could theoretically last for billions of years.
Okay but this sounds like it's gonna have the same problem as high capacity tape where the information density makes it take forever to load.
Unless it doesn't, in which case I'll take 4 for my gaming rig.
@Chickiepup I have a feeling that when they made this thing to allow data to survive apocalypses and natural disasters, and potentially last longer than the Sun itself, optimising it for speed probably wasn't one of their main concerns.
I wanna read what's on the disk before the sun explodes tho. Cus I can't survive that.
@Chickiepup I'm pretty sure you'll be able to load one of these discs before the Sun dies. Which is an improvement over DAT tapes.
@InvaderXan @Chickiepup based purely on the image, this thing seems to work more like a CD, so seek times shouldn't be such a big issue. but who knows what device can even read it.
@InvaderXan @grainloom
It's unethical to use these in a computer cus you hafta have a gnome read the runes ethched on it for you