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400 Gigabits Per Square Inch
NWprobe writes "Some scientists at Naval Research Laboratory have developed a new super disk. Nando Times has an article about it. I want a storage device like this, but will we ever see them come into production...
" "We anticipate we can put 400 gigabits in a square inch," said solid state physicist Gary Prinz of the Naval Research Laboratory, which has just contracted with a pioneering Minnesota firm to move the technology from the lab to the production line. "
Anyway, back in reality, I'll stick to getting excited about actual product shipments.
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
For Nonvolatile Electronics, Inc.'s site, go to http://www.nve.com. They have some white papers on Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM). Unlike that "alien technology" we've seen posted before, this looks to promise truly massive nonvolatile storage.
let's see 400/8 = 50 gigabytes per square inch...given that platters for a 3.5 inch drive are...~4 inches....pir^2 = 50 square inches in area....50 * 50 = 2500 gigabytes...times 2 sides... 5000 gigabytes per platter...times 2 platters a hard drive....10000 gigabytes on your standard harddrive....no?
:)
someone please double check that
It seems as though this could be built right into the cpu or into the package holding the cpu die, which would lead to getting your hard drive, ram, and cpu all in one unit.
So what happens when that package, with a certain company's operating system permanently installed and hardwired in, is available cheaper than the same hardware without any os, or with a certain "free" os pre-installed?
If this thing is "instant-on", then either os will be right there, ready to go as soon as you hit the switch, but one certain company will be able to subsidise the purchase, whereas the other os, even though free, won't have a financial behemoth behind it (unless it's AOL, and you have to be a subscriber of theirs to get the discount, or maybe even for the hardware to work at all).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Nando Times is a spin-off of the Raleigh, North Carolina newspaper "The News and Observer". The N&O (n and o, nando, get it?) got into the ISP business several years ago with, IIRC, Nando.net, which I think still exists, but the actual subscriber base got sold off to Mindspring a few years back.
If linking like that becomes illegal, won't that pretty much be the end of the internet as we know it?
As to whether or not Slashdot can or should provide content, I don't think that's what it's really here for. We the Slashdot audience provide the content. Unfortunately the content is sometimes of the quality of posts like yours.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Heh.. I recall reading on New Scientist about using really small pins dragged around a wax disk or cylinder or something. You could heat it up to make a pit, and if it hit a pit it would heat up slightly due to friction while getting out of it and you could detect that. Those pits could be really damn small.
I tried a search on their website, but couldn't come up with a link, could be its only in their print version (and I'm not searching THAT!) or I just wasn't lucky.
-W
IIRC those chips were made out of a thin layer of garnet, and the description of the individual memory cells being shaped like "tiny doughnuts" rings a bell. At the time I think the biggest one they had was about 500K, but considering how much smaller the current electronic paths are in state of the art semi-conductors compared to what was available in 1986), I find myself wondering how this "new" technology is different from the older one. Is anyone out there in /. land familiar with both enough to fill in the details?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I think the key to this technology really is the size. The problem with PC's now is that even though the processor is getting faster, the rest of the system is lagging behind. With faster and smaller memory, and the ability to put the memory right on the CPU, we could really see the speed boost we are looking for.
A major advantage of the new technology is that the memory system is nonvolatile
Kiss your slow hard drives goodbye, and now almost all of the computer can fit on one card. All the case is needed for now it the expansion slots. Too bad it is too early in development, though...
The thing that matters is the balance between size, speed, and price. The article doesn't seem to touch upon this point very much.
There are many very promising technologies out there. The real problem with memory right now does not seem to be the size at all. For example, hard disk density (size) doubles every year. However, the access time (speed) only decreases about 30% every 10 years.
I think these figures are correct. If not please correct me.
First of all, the technology promises 400 gigabits/in^2, which translates to 50 GB. Don't even bother to translate how much it would be if you made a hard drive out of it, because this technology will push us far beyond hard drives. Imagine something like Sony's memory sticks with 50 GB on it. You could throw about 10 DVDs on it. Buisiness cards, with 100 GB of storage on it. Little MP3 players with years of listening time. Hell, we could probably just have portable WAV players. This will be particularly interesting when compact computer parts like monitors become viable. If I could have a pair of glasses with a display, and a tiny DVD player the size of a pager, with piles of DVDs stored on tiny memory sticks, this would be ideal, and not too far off. You then unplug you display glasses from the DVD player and plug it in your wearable computer, and have access to a huge amount of pawer and data in a very small size. This brings us much closer to wearable and micro-portable electronics.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
10,000 Gigabits in a volume size of a sugar cube storage device made at the University of Toronto by Dr. Eugenia Kumacheva working at UofT and sponsored by XEROX.
http://www.geocities.com/roman_mi r.geo/NoFCFS.gif
and this is what I have to say about that.
You can't handle the truth.
It really did have to happen, but it still kicks ass. They talk in the article about how the entire system is digital - i.e. you don't have a spinning disk or any mechanical pieces. You take out the mechanical pieces, and you've eliminated most of the reason drives fail. Not only that, but the whole reason hard drives are so slow as compared to say, processor registers or RAM is that they're rotational - they're mechanical and not digital.
:) They say that the two characteristics of storage, speed and price, are roughly proportional - the less you pay the slower it is.
Of course, ideally, you could have a mass storage unit that was several gigabytes of the same stuff that processor registers are made of, but I wouldn't even care to know how much one of those drives would cost.
I'm just wondering how long it will take to get one of these to market. I wish Moore's law also applied to time-to-market.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Because, dimwit, from the engineering side, it's ALWAYS bits.
Memory chips are measured in BITS. We put a bunch of them together (a couple 4x128mbit's ) to make one megaBYTE, for you, the consumer who wouldn't understand bits.
Bits are more accurate. More quantifiable.
Traditionally, Kilobyte refers to 1000 bytes when dealing with data transmission, and 1024 bytes when dealing with memory.
Now, when dealing with software written by those who don't know this, it could be either.
But a kilobit is always a kilobit. 1000 bits.
Ethernet is 100 MegaBIT because it's channel usage is measured in bits Things go on and off it a bit at a time. and NOT always in even increments of 8. Same for gigabit.
The SAME FOR THE WAY hard drives encode data! What is actually stored on the drive has little directly to do with what you think is stored there. All kinds of encoding is used. Each bit may be comprised of three bits on the platter....
Talk about computing coming full cicle. This sounds like nano-scale magnetic core memory.
What's next? 0.6 micron punch cards?
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
If the per-chip cost is low enough, it would probably be more cost effective to surface-mount the components and chuck the whole unit when one went bad than it would be to have a socketed board and replace an individual chip. For a consumer product, this approach would probably work well -- when one chip died, the whole unit would keep working, giving the user time to buy a new unit and back up his data onto the new one. Considering that the MTBF on solid-state electronics is pretty high, by the time one chip died the whole unit would be effectively obsolete anyway. For a server, you'd want it to be hot-swappable; but for a consumer product a sealed unit would be fine.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Microsoft announced that it was now able to ship beta copies of Windows 2002 on a single, 8" hard drive unit. Under further questioning, the spokesperson admitted that they had attempted to use the latest AI compression algorithms to remove redundancy, but that the program had simply wiped the disks clean. The spokesperson later said that, as yet, it had not been determined if this had been a bug in the AI.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I really thought the whining would stop, but instead both users and the industry have chosen to ignore the new prefixes (summarized below to emphasize the triviality of quibbling) I did not expect everyone to start doing instant conversions, but I did expect them to start using the units as a ballpark indicator of which sort of 'mega' they were using.
True, the difference between terabit and tebibit is only 10%, but if you're going to whine about that 10% (or the 5% megabit gap), presumably you should be using the new standards.
__________
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
More importantly, because there are no moving parts, you'd have incredible levels of reliability and very low latency. This is sorely needed -- while hard drive capacity has been advancing rapidly, hard drive speed has only made modest improvements. In many applications (databases, for example) the biggest performance bottleneck is physical I/O. Even with the fastest hard drives, you still have latency measured in milliseconds (10^-3) -- because you have to wait while you wait for the platter to spin around to the byte you need (on a 10k RPM drive, you have to wait an average of 12ms to [physically] read an arbitrary sector). Conventional RAM, with nanosecond (10^-9) level latency, is 6 orders of magnitude faster -- that's roughly 1 million times faster, for the math-challenged. Getting rid of this disparity has enormous significance for I/O intensive computing.
The real implication here isn't having a multi-terabyte hard drive on your desktop, but having hard drives that actually keep up with the rest of the computer.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?