I wish the development team much luck! I worked for years on holographic storage using similar polymers. We found writing the data would change its physical location in the medium, and the physical offset may not be constant. We could always recover the data, but the search algorithm was called far too often killing read performance.

"Want what"? 🤣 I think that was her best joke yet.

Love the channel. I produced Blu-ray discs for a major Hollywood studio. It's not a shiny coating. A purchased disc (instead of burned) is literally a piece of metal foil stamped by a glass master disc and sandwiched between plastic! That way you can create a 50GB disc in literally a second.

If we end up with a petabyte storage device you can count on smart phones with cameras that take a 500TB pic and we'll still be running low on storage. 😁 Thanks for the great videos!

By 2040, TV/VCR repair will be kickin it rad

This could be what physical media needs to make a comeback. A TV show like Friends was released as a 40 DVD set which is crazy. Even the 20 disc BluRay includes a lot of disc swapping. Now imagine a single disc containing the entire series, bloopers, extras, commentary tracks, etc that didn't fit on the old discs, all in 4K.

Bit is not the same as a byte.. sigh.

multi layer optical has been tried many times in the past. I remember around 2000 there was a company that had a 10 layer disk that could hold a lot but they never got off the ground. This 100 layer sounds more promising but like you say if the speed may be too slow right now. The one from the 2000s didn't even spin as it was in that format for simplicity and the availability of packaging would save money. The laser would do the aiming and all the work back and forth.

Bit != byte It's 0.125 petabyte which is very impressive anyways. 125 terabytes. Make it a cube or some geometric shape and move the laser to read instead and you have "data crystals" like the scifi shows.

Tapes are still used in archiving because they have yet higher density than hard drives. The problem with optical/magnetic media is latency of random reads. The main advancements in storage over the last 10 years has been making randomly addressable storage, like SSDs, large enough and cheap enough for consumer use.

When I was in play-school, my dad and I used to use MS-DOS on our IBM Aptiva. We used Windows 98 in grade 2 while other computers were using either Windows 95 or 2000 (the latter being my schools computers). On that grade's school supplies list was a 1.44 MB floppy disk. 2006-7 we got a slightly more modern machine that ran Windows 7. I used Windows 8.1 in university and now I'm holding out against Windows 11 while on Windows 10. I've seen records, tapes, floppies, Zip Drives, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, 256 *KB* USB sticks, 2 GB sticks, 60 GB sticks, 24 GB - 24 TB HDDs, 58 - 16 TB SATA SSDs, and 32 GB - 8 TB NVMe drives. I've personally owned a 1.44 MB floppy, a 256 *KB*, 2 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB, 58 GB, 256 GB USBs, 58 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB, 8 TB, 16 TB HDDs, 58 GB, 128 GB, 256 GB, 1 TB SATA SSDs, 58 GB, 256 GB, 1 TB NVMe drives. The most data I've ever needed to store is about 5 TB.

Holographic Versatile Disc(HVD) was suppose to do 3.9 TB storage, that was 20 years ago and it failed miserably.

The mechanical stability of the medium is also important. If the medium distorts, as plastics are known to do, the narrow tolerances for distances may be violated.

So, about three decades ago there was a guy, Dr Eugen Pavel, if I'm not mistaken. He built a thing that stored information in the same way, on a thick piece of glass, the capacity being about 10 to 20 PB and, being glass, the data would have remained in there for like 2000 years. The name of the product was Hyper CdRom, I think. Now we know who did he sell his technology :)

I love a "comeback" when I still use the thing that's coming back 😆

It's always funny seeing memory advance. It's like waiting for the rain and then suddenly there is a flash flood and you just sit there astounded.

Back in the late 1960s, a science paper that we got in high school told of an advance in data storage using a solid crystal and lasers. That paper stated that a block the size of a cigar box could hold all the music ever written and recorded. I never heard any more about that technology. BTW, I still use CDs to distribute recordings and to make "mixtapes" for the car. Yes, my car is only 3 years old and has a CD player. I also use Blu-ray discs as extra backup for important files. I am looking for increased storage for my home computer for audio and video recordings, as well as books and other files. There is a Reddit group for data hoarding, and this development will thrill them. Perhaps they've already heard.

I have just read an article saying it is Pb (petabit), not PB(petabyte). 1B=8b. 1PB=8Pb=1000TB

I'm so old, I saw toys that I used to play with as a kid being sold in an Antique Shop.

A bit is the smallest unit in computing, representing a single binary value, whereas a byte comprises 8 bits. A bit can represent only two distinct values, whereas a byte can represent 256 combinations (2^8).

Just mini disks! I loved those. The protective case type were probably the best. You can still find them although rarer.

It is beautiful, clear and precise, the English language but the one that comes out of your mouth and then the KZfaq subtitles easily detect the words and translate them without fail

I used 8 track tapes, floppy disks we carried in school books on green screen computers, we used Dbase coding in computer class in the 80's. Then came casette tapes, and then CD's. Back then not too many people liked CD's, because it seemed the mediums were changing too fast. But, being able to change to a different track or song with a single button was pretty interesting. I know I always liked how amazing the sounds can be on vinyl. But being able to jog and enjoy music on a walkman was very enjoyable in the day. The only problems seemed the best way to run so they did not skip while you were running. There was a lot of changes going on back then and it was very fast. Portable phones had to be wired into cars or a large battery you would carry in a bag to now being able to walk around with it in your pocket. Modern smart phones are more powerful than most rooms full of computers back then. It will be nice to see how this new tech makes CD's more prevalant again.

i remember invention of terabyte DVD using current hardware and discs with changing only lenses to donut-shape, it was in the news like 10+ years ago. Donut lenses upgrades laser to nano scale. But students of that american university don't deliver it to market, it's really hard to find documents about it in archives.

Usb flash / ssds don't have "magnetizable cells", though. It's charge that is stored. It can also leak given time :)

You missed 25 years. Hyper CD-ROM with an initial capacity of 1 Petabytes (1000 TB) and a theoretical capacity of 100 EB (1 million GB) was invented by romanian scientist Eugen Pavel in 1999.

Sabine! I love your content! And finally you have touched on an industry that I was involved in and I have a few comments about this video (most of the time I'm intrigued but don't fully understand what you are talking about!). I implore you to read my comments: I was a software developer for Blu-Ray products for a major studio (I'm under NDA so i'm not sure if I'm able to tell you which one). In my opinion optical storage of any size is not coming back due to some inherent disadvantages. But let me explain the background: Compact Discs were popular because it delivered Digital quality music to the consumer and high capacity data for installation discs etc for computers. CDs were simply not large enough to play a movie even in SD (Standard Definition) DVD could store about 5GB... That was large enough to store a compressed movie in SD. Remember DVDs existed at the same time of the birth of the internet yet DVD was preferred because downloading 5GB was not practical back then... it was more convenient to go to the store and buy a disc. But something VERY important to understand is that the quality of a movie was GREATLY effected by the Variable Bit compression of the media.... there is a profession called a compressionist who artfully adjusts many parameters (mainly the Variable bit rate) in order to create the highest quality movie experience that can fit in 5GB... Blu-Ray was introduced and at a minimum a Blu-Ray disc could store 50GB (and Blu-Ray is actually where the layering technology was introduced allowing up to 4 layers so that a Blu-Ray disc could get as large as 200GB.). Blu-Ray was large enough to compress HD (High Definition) and later 4k & HDR. incidentally can you guess what Blu-Ray's secret sauce is? its in the name! Blue lasers have a smaller light wave that DVDs red laser and therefore more data could be stored in the same sized media. Now, you might think "Why not create a Gamma Ray disc! The wavelengths are even smaller!" That is true but getting a small nuclear explosion needed to generate gamma rays inside a consumer device turned out to be too challenging.... (ok, i'm joking about gamma ray discs) The thing is people prefer Download to own for its convenience. Instead of going to the store and buying a disc, People prefer to watch the same movie online which will be delivered in a handful of GB vs a 200GB Blu-Ray because its easier, however, the download to own movies have a smaller bit budget therefore they are far more compressed (even if they brag being 4k and HDR the real measure of quality is a high bit rate in compression and high bit rate equals more bits that has to be downloaded etc.) The other thing is that recording the data (i.e. Burning a disc) has always been a very long process.... hours and hours to burn a 50GB blu-ray... so even though it makes a great archiving product it is just not even close to as convenient as the cloud. I think a movie put on a disc that stored a petabyte would be AMAZING but consumers will not favor it over the convenience of deciding he or she wants to see a movie and then watching that movie 30 seconds later without leaving home. Again, LOVE your content! You have taught me much oh sensei!

Some of us, Sabine, still use DVD and even CD storage.

In 1963 when I was a pre-teen schoolboy just getting into Sc-Fi, I imagined a "crystal memory", which consisted of a semi-transparent cube with light beams reading and writing in 3-D via 3 facets at right angles to each other, to create and read distortions in the atomic rows of the crystal lattice. They're getting closer! :-)

If made commercially, these would most likely be enclosed in a standard HDD casing of sorts, simply because anything on the surface of the disk would start to be a problem - imagine one of these getting scratched! Instead of one song being glitched out, you just lose gigabytes of data X_X This is similar to floppy disks and hard-drives; both run on the same principle - but the HDD requires a level of cleanliness only available inside a sealed metal box!

Who remembers the HVD (holographic versatile disc) that was announced some time back, never made it outside the lab, i think at the time it held a terabyte of storage which is still a fair bit.

CDs and DVDs weren't too long ago, but it still amazes me how fast tech moves. For me those medias aren't that old at all but I've been talking with a lot of "young" people that doesn't even know what the heck those are, and I'm 37 yo.

I remember reading about this disc technology about 18 years ago and it was known as Holographic Versatile Disc. DVD was the precursor to this because DVD introduced the idea of layers to use the volume depth of the disc to store data. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc

1:53 Flash drives don't use magnetism at all. They use basically MOSFETs with a floating gate. Charge is stored there (tiny amounts). The only integrated devices that used magnetism were magnetic bubble memories and thick layer magnetic memories (that were a kind of integrated form of magnetic core memories). They are not used anymore for a long, long time.

read about this 30+ years ago in a science magazine at school, back then it was called PAP-DVD (using Photo-Adressable-Ploymeres) which could be 3d aligned with a green laser and read with a red laser, only problem back then was, that the material was very brittle.

I remember back in the early 1990s, at an IEEE meeting, they were talking about 3D optical state storage being the future. Basically the same thing as this, except it wasn't spinning. Good to see that 35 years later, this is still being talked about and China has finally gotten ahold of old IEEE papers.

If the data retention is significantly longer than current optical media, this could be useful as an offline archival data storage method.

And in addition to technical comments below, a bit is only one eighth of a byte, so a 1 petabit disk would be 128 terabytes of storage. But fun to watch. Thanks Sabine.

Hi. I used to rely on DVDs as my storage for a while. There were some problems with that. Firstly, when they appeared, burning (writing to) to them could fail, destroying the disk. Also, while you could write several times, filling the disc gradually, it took quite a while for each operation, so I did that maybe 2 times. You did have re-writable discs, but most were one write only, so any modification (like removing a picture from a catalog) was impossible (the many-use ones cost about 5 times more and could also fail). So, if you had some data that you wanted to keep and access only rarely, or that you just wanted to backup, they were fine. Still, in time, some could degrade and this was the main reason I witched to other media eventually. I look to this new (or new/old) technology with hope, but I wonder if the issues suffered by the DVDs wont be even more pronounced here.

Can I just say that - As a kid who always took a portable CD player to college - 00:47 actually made me cry when it forced me to realise I'm not far off drawing a pension in most countries. Just as well I live somewhere that doesn't classify someone as a „pensioner“ until they surpass the age of Paul Daniels... 👴🇬🇧😉 Age-related jokes aside; If this tech takes off, then a lot of the 2000-era methods for managing CD/DVD-ROMS and DVD-RAM media can be bought back into service. Before large capacity HDDs became affordable, many companies needing GB/TB of online storage turned to CD jukeboxes as a practical solution, normally paired with smaller HDDs used as cache devices. These would allow several items of required data to be loaded and copied off disk X to the cache before the robot stored X and retrieved/loaded disk Y, which would be accessed in a similar fashion. 📼 This „Swap in/swap out“ methodology has been used for decades. Whether the media is punched cards, floppy disks, CD/DVD-ROMs, HDDs or Ultrium cartridges, the handling of high-latency, large capacity media can always be approached using well understood techniques. 👍

When Philips started producing compact disks in England in 1983, many were skeptical and doubted if this would work at all !

My record collection didn’t survive the transition to CD’s, but I still have my CD collection despite the fact that they’re filed away and never used. Not even sure if they’d play on my computer, but I’m guessing they would. At 58, I have witnessed a lot of changes in technology in my lifetime starting with AM radios in cars with manual push button presets, the birth of FM radio, Hi fi stereos, eight track tape players, VHS video units for the home, digital watches, home computers, dial up internet with Earth link, cell phones, smart phones, etc. I would be interested to see what the next few decades has in store for us.

This type of technology was available 20 years ago. It never became commercially available because they wanted to exhaust the market for standard DVDs first, and the prices wanted would be prohibitive. But then the trend shifted back to hard drive storage because of their increased capacity, portability, affordability and perceived better security. They were talking about having the entire Star Trek franchise on one disk, and even greater technology was in the works before it was abandoned. Oddly enough the old CD/DVDs if looked after would well outlast the hard drives and SSD of today. Modern PCs don't even have players for them but if you have an old portable maybe you can.

As a film maker, I still have clients that prefer their finished video loaded on to a Bluray or Std. def. DVD. This allows them to choose from the opening menu whether they would like to "Play Video" or simply go to a different section of the film. Also, a DVD player is easily connected to their TV which is not always the case with a drive of some sort.

Playing some of the big pc rpg games from the early 90's now and it's amazing how they put all these amazing ideas, stories and music into 20 megabytes or less.

Very minor correction: Only the re-writable media used lasers to encode data on optical media like DVD & CDs. The movies and music you'd buy from the store were stamped physically with indentations.

There was a company in Australia many years ago that researched and proto typed a disc that was very similar to this they called it 5d disc by memoryit was over 26tb. It was supposed to be the come back of dvd storage. And everyone was very excited. Then the technology vanished. My guess is they sold to a company and they made it disappear.

I remember when an 80 column by 12 row punch card was "state-of-the-art" data storage (YES, I'm that old!), along with 7 track magnetic tape. Someday, we'll be storing data at the sub-atomic level, 0's and 1's being determined by the direction of spin of the electrons.

OUCH! I remember using cassette tapes for computer storage. My first real computer had a 140K Floppy disk. We would notch one side with a paper punch to make a Flippy for double-sided storage. My mother even worked seasonal during tax season as a keypunch operator for the IRS in the 60s. "If you're old enough..." That hurt. lol

4:29 the most important is how reliably can store the data in long periods of time

Great way of explaining this, enjoyed your sense of humour 👍

@1:52 It is my understanding that flash memory uses a static charge that is insulated by SiO2 to store data. The voltage in each cell is carefully controlled and voltage is measured to determine the cell's data.

First time in my life that I really feel I am 40 😅 Sabine explaining CDs as paleology, priceless!

At about 1:30. Commercial CDs were actually discs of aluminium mechanically stamped with all the holes representing the binary data in one go. They were only read using a laser. CD-Rs and CD-RWs were read and written (and erased if possible) using lasers, here the medium is a kind of ink I believe. Also, the description of Flash drives at 1:55 isn't right. Information isn't stored in magnetisable cells; instead it's stored as electrons across a transistor's PN junction. Applying a reverse polarity overcurrent causes the electrons to 'permanently' tunnel across the junction causing the transistor to read a 0, but the electrons can be forced to tunnel back using an even higher, current a limited number of times causing the transistors to read 1 again. Modern flash uses multi-level transistor currents for higher density storage, but the principle remains. In any case, it's not magnetic.

I love collecting movies so this news excites me as both a collector AND avid proponent of archiving!

Hi Sabine, great channel, very informative! Interesting to see how much could be stored on "newer" CDs. I havent had a CD player/reader/writer in my home for the last 10 years, but been thinking about it as a super affordable backup medium. Cheers!

1:53 Modern flash drives store information magnetically, in little magnetizable cells? I think a citation is needed here. You got disk storage and NAND/NOR memory mixed up.

The problem for me is not the amount of storage in a medium, it is the lentgh of time the medium can reliably store the information. Any regular optical disc for storage (different from commercial audio or video discs) uses dyes that deteriorate over time, somewhere between 10 - 20 years, the same is true for harddisc drives, and it gets worse for thumbdrives, or even tape storage that uses magnetism (LTO) to write the information. I therefore switched for any photography, family research, document storage that need to last beyond my lifetime (especially for genealogy) to M-disc, that like the commercially produced entertainment discs burn a physical deformation (pit) into the information layer.

I still use bluray disks for long term video footage storage. Big name hard drives failed me but bluray disks newer failed me. But storage bins are growing. This would be nice thing for us if they come to consumer level.

Just as an FYI, Blu-Ray is the current optical storage standard; one needn’t look back to DVDs. Also, the spelling “disk” refers to mechanical-/physical-based data encoding/retrieval, while “disc” refers to wave-privileged media, such as optical discs (as spelled on the IEEE standard logo for the “Compact Disc”).

I worked in storage pretty much my whole career, and multi-layer optical has been worked on since at least the mid 1980s. The hold up has always been commercializing it. Frankly I hope this time they can make it happen, because my 2 x 6 TB HDDs are also filling up.

Dear @Sabine (In the interest of clarity) the CDS/DVDs didn't die because they were superseded by HDs (HDs were there already.. and they always had more capacity than CD/DVDs). CD/DVDs were media storage external to the PCs, and in that sense they were replaced by flash-drives, (or pen drives, or whatever people call them in their respective countries). And (OMG... this one was worse...) a bit is not the same as a byte. A byte is an arrangement of 8 bits.

Later iterations of the DVD had two layers and the empty ones where called dual-layer DVD+RW or DVD-RW. They almost doubled the amount of memory to be stored from 4.5 GB to 8.5 GB to the disk. But writing to those took a long time.

The last proper optical disk was the M Disc, via an M Drive. Instead of using optical/chemical imprinting, it actually burnt a bit on the disk. Good for at least 100 years. There were disks in their own protective shell, which was a good ideal. Let us hope anything newer can be holistic and everywhere.

1:55 In flash drives there is nothing magnetizable. The info is stored in a charge of a very long lasting capacitors. Frau Hossenfelder didn't bother to learn the hardware.

Knew it was a good idea to hold on to my cd collection

Thanks for the update Sabine! Promising news indeed. A few years ago I heard they were working on a similar technology in the shape of a cube, with data stored as holograms. They were talking about all the data that mankind ever created in the size of a sugar cube!

I worked as a computer service tech when the 1st Gigabyte HDD came to market. I remember our head tech looking at one and saying, "Why would anyone ever need a whole Gigabyte?" (also, this was when every new CD drive was a 2x speed 3x and so on)

2:33 Correction: A bit (b) is not the same as a byte (B)! One Byte is composed of 8 bits (or 9 bits if there is a parity bit). So a Petabit (Pb) is one eighth (1/8) the size of a Petabyte (PB).

I knew it! RED DWARF was right! They stored Holly on a massive disk! It must have been one of these!

hmmm... I wish, instead of increasing memory, they would invent new methods of condensing/packing data way more efficiently and faster and unpacking it on the fly. would save a lot of recources and money... I remember downloading, *cough* totally legally of course *cough* , a computer game, which was just a few hundred MB and unpacked to multiple GB. the routine was written by some german guy in some university (that's what the command window said), but I have never seen it been used anywhere else 😕

Compact discs were coated in Polycarbon-ate (PC), a ressource highly wanted back in recycling, also called Makrolon as a product. Private users burned their content whilst official music cd's for the mass were pressed Aluminium dics coated in polycarbonate, more reliable. But i'm a little to detailed here.

Whatever happened to the crystal research? Some people were looking into storing data inside crystals like they used in Babylon 5.

1:15 For info, the "some kind of plastic" was polycarbonate.

At 1:54 Sabine makes a factual error in saying that USB flash drives use magnetic storage media. That is obviously incorrect. USB flash drives, as with all SSD drives, are semiconductor storage media which use NAND memory cells.

Came back to this specifically for the intro. Top tier

2:33 A bit is _not_ the same as a byte. A bit (short for BInary digiT) is the smallest unit of information and can have only two values. A byte is a group of 8 bits that as a unit can have 256 values. Bit is abbreviated with a lowercase b, while byte is abbreviated with a capital B. For example, 8 MB is 8 megabytes, but 8 Mbps is 8 megabits per second.

I'm old enough to have grown up with cassette tapes 😂 so I remember

I've heard of a similar technology at least 10 years ago. And by the looks of it - they still have ways to go before they have a marketable product.

Speed is definitely a major factor here. When SSDs were starting to become a thing, I traded in my old large capacity HDD for a lower capacity SSD. The speed increase was worth the storage downgrade.

I remember reading about this multilayer method many years ago, starting to come out finally ! Cheers

I still have many musical compact discs, Kate Bush was my first compact disc I bought back in the day. Gaz UK

My first computer had 1kb of volatile memory, it was a Sinclair ZX81 in 1981. You could add a ram pack of 64KB but who would ever need this much memory? It started me a journey.

Excellent! Hopefully this can serve as a long term solution for data archival and be available at some point commercially. 100gb M-discs were all the rage but now I hear the discs aren't as great as the archival grade they were stated to be.

Tape storage has made somewhat of a comeback for cold storage sites. I think if they managed to get even in the high TB of data on disks and it was somewhat fast read and write, there would be interesting impacts to backup sites as well. But I think disk media needs to pick back up. Physical media entertainment is slightly more of a hassle but it has its cathartic moments as well. Having the special feature, bloopers, and games on a disc was sort of special. Heck we even bright back VHS tapes so that we can play movies for our kids and have a hard stopping point rather than a streaming service where either it keeps going or you have a title screen stay on. Plus the commercials are so 90s and I love the nostalgia. And if you play them enough your kids inherit some of that nostalgia

With the "Smaller and More Powerful" in full bloom on this recording device, If it works out as well as the creation of the floppy disk and then the hard CD/DVD, this will be as revolutionary. I envision 1 inch disks or sticks or info layered cubes holding medical or encyclopedia sets, movie series with recording / decimating 1/4 pocket size devices. Even quick change detailed info. to tell self operating machines how to transverse distances or preform operations on living beans. In future, if miniaturized enough, how about on person hearing aid sized ready available info. The wide use of such devices could bring in "A Brave New World" for the better. :)

This would be so cool! I'd love to be able to save my routine back-ups permanently on optical media. Currently, I have to use spinning external drives and cycle them, as my back-ups take close to 10TB. Petabyte optical disks would be so cool!

Another problem with optical disks was that they were not protected. The manufacturers did not want to do it right which was put them in a a cartridge. I considered using CDs for backup as questionable since too easy to damage and you did not know. I did have a version that used a cartridge, and that was reliable. I got so frustrated with losing data on CDs

I value Sabine's explanations of physics concepts, but this video seemed a bit botched and out of her area of knowledge. Flash doesn't store data using magnetism as stated in the video, optical media was probably killed more by fast internet speeds than magnetic disk capacities. Optical storage also suffered from being very unreliable. BluRay Disk almost came to the rescue after DVD but the licensing restrictions meant it was never an affordable way to archive data.

Avionics at American Airlines,we used floppy disk for transfer of nav data to the aircraft from a receiving station. Only about five years ago.

CDs and DVDs did not die because of HDD which were already of much much larger storage capacity and much much faster... They died because of the spread of the internet, the modern download speeds and the changes it brought to the business model of entertainment companies.

I remember hearing similar stories about the boundless possibilities of storing data on a roll of Tesa adhesive film 25 years ago.

Your entire description of what CDs are makes them (and me) sound a lot older than they (and me) actually are.

remember optical storage? I remember tape cassettes and even 8 track tapes and later when blank cd media was about $8 per disk, which is about $15 today

Speed was a huge factor for CD's/DVD's as well. If it takes 4X longer to get the info off these discs than compared to an SSD or HDD, they will likely not be adopted except for companies using them for backups. But those companies using them for backups would only adopt this tech if the discs are stable and don't have issues with losing data over periods of time which is an issue with some CDR's where some could lose data after a while.

In the 90s the TV show Beyond 2000 showed a crystal and laser memory storage system. But I can't find a copy of the show. I just remember it from when I was a kid.

1:54 Moder flash drives don't use magnetic cells, it is special kind of capacitor

I've often wondered if we could increase the capacity of dvd and bluray. Imagine getting an entire tv series on one disc, that really would scare the streaming services.😁

This is so cool! Thanks for making me aware!

The problem with CDs was how they were used to read and write and how easily they were to scratch. If that gets solved, they will make a comeback. Other than that, they're only as good as the Floppy Drives Data Centers use to backup their data.