Storage breakthrough could bust density record
Researchers have developed a breakthrough storage technology capable of squeezing the contents of 250 DVDs onto a disk the size of a quarter. The technique involves using the self-assembly properties of chemically dissimilar polymer chains to array themselves into ludicrously dense but perfectly regular formations. Working with …
Of course that would drastically reduce the space taken by my exteme pr0n collection, but it will allow for more bloat in code... waiting for the "stop complaining about windows taking up 574 TB of space for less functionality than your 50 MB Linux distro, you have a 1024 PB hard drive!" line...
Say 3 years before it reaches consumers?
And like Blueray, by the time it's ready for deployment the various copyright and DRM dinosaurs will have killed this tech dead with so much cruft on any hardware that uses it that it won't be worth it to use it. Blech.
...about the costs of detailed telecom data retention, my Good People. Storage costs are going down, yes they are.
Yeah, but it's always been like that; if someone had told me ten to fifteen years ago that my OS [ubuntu, Vista, whatever] would require at least a 10gb disk to install on [taking swap and reasonable application installs into account], I'd have laughed them out of the room.
Erroneously.
Progress marches on, and this shit sounds cool as fuck as far as us storage whores as concerned. Bring it on!
Steven R
...Seek time?
(Which is not to say that I wouldn't happily take a handheld computer with a 2TB drive if it was offered to me, mind you...!)
I seem to remember an old Reg article talking about IBM growing using similar techniques for growing nano-tube isolation layers on wafers.
While the article talks about using it for storage, it also has a play in chip lithography.
Mind your bits and Bytes. The TDK record was 803 gigabits (not Bytes) and 250 DVDs are 5 GBbytes * 8bits *250 = 10 terabits (not Bytes). Still impressive.
So what would TPB say about this? Just about the only consumer driven non scientific site that could take a whack at filling up some of that quarter.
"squeezing the contents of 250 DVDs onto a disk the size of a quarter"
Exciting!
A quarter of what tho?
Yep, listen to the above comment. Read the link again - it's 10 Tb, not 10 TB
Sheep don't so much plummet - as fly.
Looking forward to pico-storage in the not too distant...
(Paris cos she's small but capacious..)
"...250 DVDs onto a disk the size of a quarter"
A quarter of what?
I thought this was a site based in the UK :-p
Weird.. I thought a DVD was 4.7GB? And dual-layer is twice that... Perhaps they were talking dual layer?
Think about how easy it will be to lose loads of data in future.
How many of these ‘quarters’ fit in Wales?
Maybe the author could try expressing this in standard units (avoiding Fahrenheit and analogies with baseball), so we have a clue what he's talking about.
Damn it! I've already been beaten into saying a "quarter" of what?! This is a UK site.
At least complete the comparison by saying "a US quarter coin", or make a UK equivalent like "a 10 pence coin" or whatever is similar sized.
Everyone seems to be making a really huge leap, thinking this will show up in a hard drive type of storage device for a PC any decade soon.
Just because you can arrange some chains in a lab, doesn't necessarily mean there is any viable way of doing that in a cost effective computer component.
It's quite possible the only useful application for this is to send the entire knowledgebase of mankind out into space on a probe (minus the pron, which always grows faster than it can be written to disk, nevermind how big that disc is).
> It's quite possible the only useful application for this is to send the entire knowledgebase of mankind out into space on a probe (minus the pron, which always grows faster than it can be written to disk, nevermind how big that disc is).
imagine if aliens sent us all of the knowledge of their civilisation, and they left out the porn - how pissed would you be? that's how intergalactic wars get started!
"Just because you can arrange some chains in a lab, doesn't necessarily mean there is any viable way of doing that in a cost effective computer component."
Too true. The researchers haven't actually stored a single bit on their device yet. It's just a spectacularly well-ordered arrangement of molecules. Still, it does suggest that there won't be a problem with any "lithography wall".
But there's another problem. We can build single CPUs with hundreds of cores, but no-one does (yet) because we have no idea how to write software that benefits. Similarly, even if you can put 10TB onto a USB thumb drive, are you really going to read and write that space through just one set of wires? At 50MB/s, which is stretching USB to the limit, it would still take two and a half days *solid* to touch the entire drive. (Then again, there was an optical demuxer here a few days ago with a switching speed that would let us do the job in a few minutes.)
I suppose one could instead put 5TB on the chip and use the remaining space for a few thousand CPU cores, but we still don't know how to program it. It appears that the hardware guys have the next decade or so pretty much mapped out, whereas the softies have barely come to terms with the present day.
... as I just took the statement to mean a quarter of the current size of a DVD.
Bizarre measurement and completely unimaginable to anyone in the rest of the world.
Being a Brit reading a Brit technology website I have no idea how big a quarter is.
El Reg I know you have writers in the US but can you please remember that this is a British website, thanks.
Apart from that, this sounds amazing if it can be applied to circuit design as well, coupled with OLED displays I can imagine a few years from now we are going to have computers that look like pieces of paper.
The STOP is for the use of American descriptions, not the subject of the article.
For those expressing aux bafflement, a quarter is about the size of a shilling.
I always wondered why Man was so keen for aliens to read his diary.
finally some sense... they did say in the article that 'finding a read/write head' would be the next obstacle... :P
Like a lot of tech, they may well be 'dumped' when found to be too expensive/complicated, a new tech is found, more efficient ways of using old tech is found (they are still improving plasma & LCD), or the sponsor 'gives up' for political or finance reasons... (SEDs, due to better LCDs..)
Seek time???? - well I wonder what those ancient 1G HD's did... quite slow compared to today...
SSDs a few years ago weren't that fast or reliable either... But they are now good enough to replace HDs...
... and how many people will admit to being old enough to remeber what a shilling was?
Why do reviewers insist in using references to coins for sizes?
Most of the World doesn't know the coin size that is talked about.
We in the UK don't know the size of a 'Quarter', and I'm sure non-UK residences don't know the size of a 10p piece.
So why not simply use millimetres?
This is suppose to be a technical site and we ALL know the metric system. (Yes even the American technical workforce know this system.)
So no excuse not to use it...
for all you brits who don't know what size an american quarter is, let me provide you a handy link
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+big+is+an+american+quarter+coin
Not having any Kenyan currency on me, I'm just as much in the dark as I was before you said that.....
I don't think there is much difference in seek time between a good 1GByte drive circa 1999 and a 1TByte drive today.
Still in the same order of magnitude.
Mine's the one with a voice coil actuated zipper
"... and how many people will admit to being old enough to remeber what a shilling was?"
I visited Austria in the late 80s and as I recall they were small silver coins about the size of a quarter, and the exchange rate was about 20 to the pound. Of course, it's all Euros now.
But I'd have to agree, I'm sceptical as to when this tech will become a viable and production ready product.
Does anyone here remember the IBM/Stanford 'breakthough' called spintronics. They discovered that they could put a posotive or negative electrmagnetic spin on an individual atom.
It reacted at the speed of light, and retained this spin indefinately, making it non-volitile.
I remember thinking at the time "this tech could replace both hard disks and RAM"
Well, where is it, then?
Personally, I hate hard drives with a passion. They're basically just magnetic record players, with high precision moving parts that wear out. It's not a matter of IF, but WHEN will they break.
The arm becomes innacurate, the motors wear out, and even the electromagnetic charge fades over time. Considering the vast majority of 21st century information is stored on these pre-doomed devices is a little unnerving.
without teams of techies constantly replacing them, all that data is certain to be lost. Hardly the vision H.G. Wells had in mind of an abandoned library re-discovered thousands of years after the last curator had passed away.
The truly killer storage tech of the future is all about what it doesn't include. No moving parts, and it must not rely on any form of chemical reaction (like flash, which also has a finite lifespan). As much of It as possible must also be constructed from noble materials, so it doesn't rot.
So far, our greatest storage tech when it comes to longevity is still paper!
This has to be great news for the future of government.
Up until now the size of the government's incompetence has been limited by the size of the storage media available. With new innovations like this however they will soon be able to fit all government data on a single disk, meaning they will be able to leave it all on the number 27 bus in one go, thus saving the taxpayer hundreds of pounds on all the train, taxi and bus fares currently needed to be absoltely sure that every citizen has their identity stolen.
So soon if i need more space there will be more space. Good.
A quarter is a term often used to relate to the size of a particular coin...
In this case it's a circle about 38.6mm across.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_twenty-five_pence_coin
Just figure a circular disc of approximately 25mm diameter.
Just figure how much easier it will be to lose that much more data all at one time.
how long will it last. How long will it take to read and write. how much will the media and drive cost. don't hold your breathe waiting for it.
As a yank who loves to read The Reg partly to learn more of "The Queen's English" (kit=gear, punter=sucker, er, uh, customer, etc.), I was amused by the "quarter" thread. I take the point because I have no idea what a 10p coin looks like (no faux bafflement here, with or without the "f"), but um, UMass & Berkeley are both on this side of the puddle, last I checked. (A good earthquake could change that in the case of UCB, though). I'm reminded of Rod Stewart's "Give me a DIME, so I can call my mother..." line.
I have noticed, with some regret, though that El Reg seems to be heading in the direction of "The Economist" with it's "smack-in-the-middle-of-the-Atlantic" POV. Life would be less humorous without articles on "How to clone an Oyster", which turn out to have nothing at all to do with mollusks...
Keith
One US quarter is about 1/32115916800000 the size of Wales.
A quarter used to fill a small bag of Woolworths pick'n'mix.
"UMass & Berkeley are both on this side of the puddle, last I checked. (A good earthquake could change that in the case of UCB, though)"
Except the eastern half of Memorial Stadium, of course. As I type, I'm not a couple hundred yards from Rogers Creek ... When, not if :-)
Go Bears!
Is exactly one fourth of a dollar.
Mine's the one that flies(read "Scanners Live in Vain" if you don't get the reference).
Because apparently the makers forgot... This will be just another bit of vaporware that will never see the light of day.
But if it does come to light, how many people would be able to afford it?
Remember to never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of these babies
well way back in the last century :D they never thought they would see a powerful PC for less than £2000!!!
IBM even said that people would not trust the reliability of a computer built with such parts!!!
And where are they now??? NOT selling computers, thats what!!!
and BTW, 'powerful' in those days, would be useless today!!
resolutions of 1900 x 1200 were the realms of fantasy!! (for a PERSONAL computer..)
**nobody** thought you would need more than 64M of ram...
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