260Gb on a CD?
Meh. That's barely enough for a development PC.
Wake me up when they invent something with 1Tb+/cm2.
Superman's "memory crystals" have flown out of the realm of fiction into fact now that boffins have found a way to store 50GB of data in a disc of glass no bigger than the screen of a basic mobile phone. The memory is highly durable. It is able to survive heat of up to 1000° C and is resistant to the knocks and bumps that …
My 2 year will have this destroyed in under 30 seconds. 'Durable' they won't be.
Besides...my favourite sci-fi memory storage thingies have got to be memory 'crystals' - approximately the same size, but cube-shaped. Naturally they will all be unlabelled because we all know the contents just by looking at it, don't we?
Can't look it up as someone borrowed my copy, don't remember who (but I've still got 2010 in my library).
Put Clarke and Kubrick in the same room and brilliance had to flow. Now if we made some big assumptions by extrapolating the storage area/density of that 260GB device then worked out how many times bigger all HAL's 'glass' memory modules were we'd get a rough idea of HAL's memory capacity.
From this, perhaps in 20 to 50 years or so, we might be able to figure out whether HAL as depicted by Arthur C. and Stanley K. had the right 'capacity' to carry out the tasks it was assigned to do. I wouldn't be surprised if it were.
I remember the week 2001 hit the cinemas, we all skived off a physics prac. to go and see it. Some days later the instructor made the sarcastic comment to the effect we'd all better first pass his coursework or we'd not have a hope in Hades of studying space science.
"Decoding the light that has passed through the cell is tricky, though, and the team says much of the work going forward will attempt to simplify the system sufficiently enough to enable it to be commercially viable to produce."
Unusable @ this point. How can they verify the data integrity then??
flash has an unpowered storage life measured in years (around 10 for SLC, considerably less for MLC). So it is a fairly crap archival medium (as are writable CD/DVD/BluRay for the same reason - similar life for consumer-grade media to 50 years tops for the expensive archival-quality stuff).