- Sphotonix’s 5D optical storage media has appeared on the latest installment of Mission Impossible
- A rare feat for a new product, its appearance is central to the movie plot
- Like Microsoft Silica, it uses silica based material to store up to 360TB per glass platter
Storage startup Sphotonix has landed itself a money-can’t-buy starring role in the big-budget Hollywood movie “Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning,” where it ended up being part of the actual scenario rather than a disposable, forgettable prop.
(No spoiler alerts) In it, its core product, a 5D optical storage media is used to store a critical element of the movie plot, potentially for billions of years.
Having been used to back up the full human genome in January 2025, we know that it can store up to 360TB on a 5-inch rectangular glass platter and uses a proprietary laser-based nano etching technology called FemtoEtch.
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That’s far more than the largest SSD (the 122.88TB Solidigm P5-5336) or HDD (36TB models from Seagate or WD) currently on the market – more about how the technology works is in the promotional video below.
Other exotic storage competitors that want to rival cold storage, archiving media such as LTO tape, include ceramic (Cerabyte), Silicium (Microsoft Silica), DNA (Biomemory, Catalog), optical disc (Folio photonics, Optera Data).
This is a tough market as witnessed through the demise of Sony’s legacy 5.5TB ODA media, but experts agree: the rapacious appetite of AI for bytes, at rest or on the move, has changed the dynamics of the ecosystem.
The worldwide enterprise information archiving market will balloon to more than $17 billion by 2031, according to research published by Verified Market Research in 2024.
SPhotonix expects that by 2028, the world will produce almost 400 Zettabytes of data, with thousands of data centres globally gobbling more than 1000TWh of power.
The storage startup was founded upon over 30 years of research by its Chief Science Officer, Prof. Kazansky, at the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Center.
I reached out to SPhotonix to find out more about the performance and other related specs of the media, as well as any meaningful time frames and prices.