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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 …
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Friday 20th February 2009 23:28 GMT Pierre
Good or bad?
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...
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Saturday 21st February 2009 00:06 GMT Steven Raith
@pierre
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
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Sunday 22nd February 2009 01:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Huh?
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).
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Sunday 22nd February 2009 21:42 GMT Mike
@AC
> 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!
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Sunday 22nd February 2009 21:42 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: Huh?
"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.
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Sunday 22nd February 2009 21:42 GMT Simon
A quarter?
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.
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Sunday 22nd February 2009 21:46 GMT jon
@AC 22nd Feb 00:59
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...
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Monday 23rd February 2009 10:33 GMT Stuart Halliday
Standards are here for a reason
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...
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Monday 23rd February 2009 11:57 GMT Psymon
getting there...
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!
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Monday 23rd February 2009 12:29 GMT Tony
Great news!
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.
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Monday 23rd February 2009 13:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Whingers
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.
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Monday 23rd February 2009 14:54 GMT Keith Wingate
Re: Quarter ... of what?
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
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Monday 23rd February 2009 19:57 GMT jake
@Keith Wingate
"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!
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Tuesday 24th February 2009 01:20 GMT Christopher Ahrens
Remember Holographic storage
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
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