Want now!

Say 3 years before it reaches consumers?

...about the costs of detailed telecom data retention, my Good People. Storage costs are going down, yes they are.

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.

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?

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?

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.

"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.

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.

... 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...

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

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!

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

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).