Western Digital has invested in archival ceramic tablet technology developer Cerabyte.
This follows strategic investments from Pure Storage and In-Q-Tel. Cerabyte’s technology involves a femtosecond laser burning nanodot holes in the ceramic coating of glass tablets. The holes form part of QR-type data patterns, provide 1 GB capacity per tablet surface, and are read using scanning microscopes. Tablets are stored offline in shelves with a robot system transporting them to and from writing and reading stations. Their contents can last in immutable form for hundreds if not thousands of years and require no energy while offline. They are denser than tape cartridges and provide faster data access.
Shantnu Sharma, Western Digital’s Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, stated: “We are looking forward to working with Cerabyte to formulate a technology partnership for the commercialization of this technology. Our investment in Cerabyte aligns with our priority of extending the reach of our products further into long-term data storage use cases.”
Western Digital has spun off its NAND fab and SSD unit, SanDisk, and is now a pure play disk drive manufacturer.
Cerabyte was founded in Germany and opened a Silicon Valley office and another in Boulder, Colorado, in summer 2024 with Steffen Hellmold recruited as a director to help with product commercialization. Hellmold used to work for Western Digital as a corporate strategy VP from 2016 to 2021, and was involved with DNA storage technology, joining Twist Bioscience after WD.
Hellmold has said: “It was previously thought only DNA storage could develop to store exabytes per rack. But Cerabyte can scale there as well.” Its tech is more practical and closer to commercialization than DNA storage.
According to Cerabyte, its ceramic data storage has the potential to enable new use cases with better total cost of ownership (TCO) than current cold-tier solutions, such as tape. It says long-term permanent data storage must be affordable, sustainable, resilient to bit rot, not require periodic maintenance or environmental control, or additional energy to reliably retain the data stored.
CEO and co-founder Christian Pflaum said: “Our ceramic data storage offers a vital, complementary long-term data storage layer that ensures rapid data retrieval – often within seconds – unlocking new revenue streams. We are excited to be working with Western Digital to define a technology partnership, fueling our ability to deliver accessible permanent storage solutions at scale.”
The company developed a demonstration prototype system in 2023 and will now be working with manufacturing partners on building a commercial product, meaning a library system with reading and writing drives, robotics, tablet-storing shelves, tablet load and removal functionality, software to manage and control it, and a ceramic tablet manufacturing capability.
A company like Quantum or SpectraLogic could help develop a ceramic tablet library system by using their existing tape technology as a starting point. Western Digital, with its experience in manufacturing disk platters, which can have glass substrates, could offer help in the tablet production area, and like Pure Storage, it has a channel through which to deliver technology products.
