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.
I honestly can’t think of a commercial application for storing that much data to disseminate outside an industrial use. Well I mean in a few years I guess video games will get that big, but other than that…
8k stereoscopic immersive feature length video is probably going to be a thing some day soon. Well… somebody will try it