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Massive Storage Advances

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the fits-in-the-palm-of-your-hand dept.

pra9ma writes: "Scientists from Keele University, in England, have suceeded creating a system that enables up to 10.8 terabytes of data to be stored in an area the size of a credit card, with no conventionally moving parts. This along with 3 other forms of memory which could revolutionize storage. The company said the system could be produced commercially within two years, and each unit should cost no more than $50 initially, with the price likely to drop later. " I'm unconvinced about their compression algorithm, but if it works, this is gonna be amazing.

9 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. a bit light on the details by freq · · Score: 4

    This article is pure crap. Professor soggybottoms invents ten fabulous new technologies that will instantaneously revolutionize the entire computer industry, all while fixing himself a ham sandwich...

    film at eleven...

    --
    "Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
  2. New storage ratings... by mduell · · Score: 4

    10.8TB = 1064 DVD's (presuming 10.4GB per DVD) = 17,400 CD's (presuming 650MB per CD) = 7,864,320 floppies (presuming 1.44MB per floppy) = 371,085,174,374 of those new MOT 256bit MRAM chips.

    Anyone want to come up with some other ratings ?

    Mark Duell

  3. This is a year and a half old... by sparrowjk · · Score: 4

    Let's see...

    $ nc www.keele.ac.uk 80
    HEAD /research/cmrkeele.htm HTTP/1.0

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 11:39:15 GMT
    Server: Apache/1.3.12
    Last-Modified: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 12:16:30 GMT
    ETag: "239a2-f60-37bd471e"
    Accept-Ranges: bytes
    Content-Length: 3936
    Connection: close
    Content-Type: text/html

    Last modified 20 Aug 1999? Not what I'd call "breaking news"... If you don't believe the server date, try this corroborating evidence: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/pipermail/postpc/1999-S eptember/000002.html

    Why news.ft.com decided to post the story now, I couldn't say...

    == Sparrow

  4. Nonsense by ideut · · Score: 4
    This is a highly unconvincing attempt at hyping what is in all likelihood a non-existant product.
    The first invention is a method of compressing text stored in binary form, which expresses information as a series of noughts and ones, by comparing each word with its predecessor and recording only the differences between words

    Well that's pretty unremarkable. They've written a compression algorithm.

    Oh, by the way, they have also invented

    "a memory system that enables up to 10.8 terabytes of data to be stored in an area the size of a credit card, with no conventionally moving parts"

    If that were true, why are they bothering to even *think* about their text compression algorithm? Fifty dollars a go? Who wants compression? If these people are telling the truth, we are talking about a thousand-fold increase in gigabytes per dollar over the space of two years.

    The phrase "no conventionally moving parts" also brings to mind images of really whacky, non-linear moving parts flailing about. What the hell do they mean?

    Absolutely no technical detail is given in the article, and as far as I'm concerned, this is yet another false alarm on the long road to entirely solid-state computer systems.

    --

    --

  5. Always the size of a credit card by HomerJ · · Score: 5

    Why is it every piece of new tech is the size a a credit card? Can't be the size of a dollar bill? or what about a piece of sliced bread, considering all this new tech is the greatest thing since.

    I just want to know what every tech inventor's opbession is with everything being the size of a credit card. It's not like we are going to fit these in our wallets. "Sure Mr. Tanaka, I have my 20 terabyte database here in my wallet, care to swap?"

    I dunno, I just wish technology came in different sizes I guess.

    1. Re:Always the size of a credit card by Coward,+Anonymous · · Score: 5

      what about a piece of sliced bread

      The size of bread slices varies widely from region to region, this prevents multinational corporations from referring to their products as the size of a piece of sliced bread. Although ANSI created a sliced bread standard in 1986 and updated their standard in 1992 to account for the coarseness of pumpernickel, this is an American standard which prevents any companies wishing to sell their product outside of the United States from using it and unfortunately the ISO has been dragging their heels on forming a sliced bread standard, so until the day when we get the ISO sliced bread standard you can expect many more credit card sized comparisons.

  6. Wow this is GREAT! by joshv · · Score: 5

    Man, I am so glad that I read slashdot. Without slashdot I would have to sift through tons and tons of bullshit every day just to find the new and amazing technological advances of the age. But no, I read slashdot, so I can come here and find the best of the best, such as this dandy invention.

    Wow 10.8 TB on a credit card, wahooo! What will they think of next? How do I send them guys my money? I couldn't find any address or nothing, but those english 'blokes' sure look like they is gunna go far with this invention - specially that text compression thingy - pretty damned original if I do say so myself. And then that storage mechanism 'no conventional moving parts' - I can't imagine how they got those conventional parts to stop movin, sound like quite a trick.

    Anyway, don't you slashdot guys let the criticism get you down. I am with you. Don't listen to them naddering nabobs of negativism. They always persecute the dreamers!

    I am looking forward to your next 'Light speed limit possibily violated' post with anticipation.

    -josh

  7. Re:The compression algorithm... by stu72 · · Score: 5
    All right,

    lynx http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/02/13/024025 4&mode=nested&threshold=-1 > slash.txt

    (no -source option because this is Slashdot, and as we all know too well, the content is much more redundant than repeating html tags, much, much more redundant)

    shelf:~$ ls -l slash.*
    -rw-r--r-- 1 stu users 20394 Feb 12 21:09 slash.bz2
    -rw-r--r-- 1 stu users 23750 Feb 12 21:09 slash.gz
    -rw-r--r-- 1 stu users 93867 Feb 12 21:09 slash.txt
    shelf:~$

    This gives a ratio of 0.22. Surprisingly, if you feed the same page to bzip2, but at +2, the ratio increases to 0.27, implying that there is more entropy and thus, more information, in higher scoring posts, which of course, we know to be false :)

    Perhaps with this firm mathematical footing, /. can proceed to a new chapter in moderation - moderation by bzip2. Articles which receive high compression ratios are marked down automatically. Of course, this would make it possible to earn a lot of karma, simply by posting random garbage. oh wait..

  8. This is unbelievable! by Darkwraith · · Score: 5

    Here's a link from the university.It sounds like it's real to me.