Do I have this correct? 360 Terabytes = 3,020,000,000 Megabits 8 Mbits/s = writing time of 377,500,000 seconds... or approximately 12 years?!?

"Zhang told us that current writing speed is 12 Kbit/sec, but that this could rise to about 8 Mbit/sec using ferroelectric liquid crystals, and to several Gbit/sec using magneto-optical spatial light modulation (MOSLM)."
If we choose middle ground, and it can be written to at 8Mbit/sec, that means a sustained write would cater for 520 yrs of recording for 360Tbit
Sounds like an ideal application for telemetry in deep space probes sent on long round trips
On the fundamental topic of readability, this kind of technology needs to have some kind of integrated light emitting laser diode of a similar level of reliability, so that future generations can adapt an obvious I/O interface to retrieve the data. Its no good designing a 5.25 floppy disk with a 1000 year shelf life if nobody can bloody read it in 100 years.

This is really cool, but at 12Kbsec, I get a rough estimate of like 20+ million years to write 360TB of data. On the other hand gigabyte+ per sec would cut it down to 4+ hours. And of course there will be no improvements...

Interesting.. Let us hope that the technology to read the data stored in this device will be preserved. Otherwise it makes no sense.

hmm, could put most of the national library on it? wonder how a cosmic ray would affect it? could multiple write / read heads be installed on one disc? a SETI type program that uses lots of data could probably use this sort of storage. really large data bases, such as (god forbid) the gov.'s email and telephone searches could go on it. a big failure point i can see is there will probably still be mechanical parts which can fail, but if they make it "insertable" that wouldn't be a problem. glass has a hardness of about 7 and dust could contain harder minerals, which would also scratch the glass -- causing errors. glass also moves slightly over a long period of time; as shown in old glass windows. that might be a problem. this thing is very thin and glass breaks / bends a little. how about vibration?

NSA to buy a few dozen of them in 3..2..1.. In all seriousness, this kind of thing is ideal for the library of congress & general archival projects. You could, literally, store the sum total of human civilization's data for later retrieval.

Glass is a state of liquid actually, changing so slowly it is mostly considered a solid.

I was expecting more.
Here is a storage device that is super-high speed, much higher density, and high write speed supporting multiple writes per write pulse made from a single crystal. Optimized for storage by using multiple acoustic waves defining specific domains to be scanned with multiple write optics. The device can be read out an entire plane at one time providing terabit per second read rates.
The basic technique can also be used to make a true 3D display or (by use of the local changes in index of refraction) be used to create a changeable and dynamic optical element.
Invented in 1980 and completely in the public domain. 33 years ago.
US 4403834

@yinfu99, notarichman
Glass isn't a liquid and doesn't shift significantly over time, (barring imperfections) contrary to urban legend. Here's one of many articles on the topic: http://engineering.mit.edu/live/news/1305-how-does-glass-change-over-time

@Tim Read: That is a reasonable approximation. The exact number is: 370 TBytes = 370 x 1024 x 1024 MBytes = 377,487,360 x 8 Mbits