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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. "
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?
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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.
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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"?