# Towards Archival Storage Using QLC Flash

- Institution: CERN
- Speaker: Ethan Miller
- Year: 2026
- Language: English
- Source: [CERN](https://videos.cern.ch/record/3021041)
- Licence: [CERN](https://copyright.web.cern)
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (sources give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the source's own words)

This talk discusses an alternate approach to archival storage: low-cost, high-capacity flash storage. Long-term archival storage is typically implemented using disk or nearline media such as tape and optical. While this approach is relatively inexpensive, it limits access to archival data behind a slow interface with limited bandwidth. In contrast, high-density QLC flash storage shipping today can fit half an exabyte into a single rack, with increases in density forecast to exceed an exabyte per rack in less than 18 months. QLC flash has low power consumption, much higher read bandwidth, and longer durability than existing archival storage, More excitingly, archival QLC flash enables new ways of interacting with archival storage via "background" experiments that piggyback on periodic data scrubbing to leverage the massive bandwidth available at low cost and power from flash storage. Using this model, researchers can run many more experiments on their archived data at relatively low cost compared to today's approach of fetching archival data to "fast" storage and analyzing it.

0:00:00 Slide 1

0:00:24 Slide 2

0:00:48 Slide 3

0:02:45 Slide 4

0:04:12 Slide 5

0:07:31 Slide 6

0:08:21 Slide 7

0:09:12 Slide 8

0:10:36 Slide 9

0:12:21 Slide 10

0:15:36 Slide 11

0:19:26 Slide 12

0:20:31 Slide 13

0:20:49 Slide 14

0:23:52 Slide 15

0:24:47 Slide 16br>

## Lectures

1. [Towards Archival Storage Using QLC Flash](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/cern/3021041/b3b1465b06aa), 25 min (CERN's player)