https://phys.org/news/2021-10-high-speed-laser-method-terabytes-cd-sized.html The best Blue Ray disk today can maybe squeeze 1-3tb, while a 500tb optical disk could power a Star Trek holodeck in 8k. Glass is cheap and only getting better, as are miniature lasers on a chip, and femtosecond lasers are fast, but you require even faster attosecond lasers to follow chemical reactions, and they're pushing the technology. Still, its something that could possibly come on the market within as few as three years. What we really need is an entirely new technology. Theoretically, every transistor should also be memory, and you could swap between using the billions of transistors on a processor for running programs, to using them for memory instead, and speed things up considerably. However, what we're likely to get in the near future, is distributed computing, with AMD adding tiny accelerators to their newest 3d V Nand stacking technology, which means we'll still require cheap storage of some kind.
