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. "

Comments

In further news...

[jd]

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.

Re:"gigabit"? Come on..

[orpheus]

It's been almost 6-10 mos since the adoption of the 'binary' prefixes: kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi

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.

kibi (Ki) = 1,024
mebi (Mi) = 1,048,576
gibi (Gi) = 1,073,741,824
tebi (Ti) = 1,099,511,627,776
pebi (Pi) = 1.125899906843 e+15
exbi (Ei) = 1.152921504607 e+18

__________

Lots of useful applications

[Tassach]

According to the article, this is very fast, nano-sized core memory. While the bit density is very impressive, that is not the most important characteristic. What is really important is the fact that it's non-volitile and has no moving parts. With storage technology like this, you could easily have things like:

• a full RAID-5 array inside a standard 3.5" (or 2.5"!) drive housing
• a Palmtop with a 20Gb of storage
• a portable MP3 player that could hold your entire CD collection
• a digital cameras that can hold thousands of images
• • The possiblities for mobile & imbedded applications are staggering!

  • 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'