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1TB In A Cubic Centimeter
rgetty writes "Inforworld posted this article describing the process used by a group of engineers and scientists from Kyoto University and Central Glass (Japan) to pack 1TB of data into a cubic centimeter of glass. Portable data warehousing is not too far off..."
The lab I work in uses nanosecond lasers to create BEC's. Down the hall though, is a faculty member who works on femtosecond spectroscopy. As someone guessed, the space required for all the equipment is very large.
It _does_ take up a room, or at least the optical bench does.
But more importantly, in order to generate femotosecond pulses, you need _enormous_ bandwidth (10^15 Hz). These are class 4 lasers that are extremely powerful and also extremely dangerous.
I can't imagine this technology being anything resembling "out of the box" anytime soon --- you'd need an entire support staff just to use it.
Clerk: Hi! Welcome to Fry's! Can I help you?
Shopper: Yes, I'd like one of those 8T holographic cubes.
Clerk: Here you are sir. That'll be $300 for the cube... oh, and $18 million for the giant femtosecond laser. You cleared out a room where you can store this?
Shopper: Yeah, I decided we don't really need a kitchen.
I am, of course, exaggerating. You can't really help at Fry's.
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
...but how the heck are we supposed to back it up?
;-)
--
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Seriously, this would be a boon for NASA. Currently, they're pushing the limits of backup technology and it's expected to get worse.
A "cube library" (as opposed to tape) with a little shuttle to move the cubes around would be a godsend even if the laser to read them costs 300k.
Picture one of these; the laser might take up most of it, but the savings would be incredible.
-- "I am disrespectful to dirt. Can you not see that I am serious!"
Sure, ten or even five years ago, media size was really important, but as bandwidth increases the information bottleneck is the cost of data storage, and the speed of data transmission.
A terabyte ina sugarcube is terriffic, but not because I'll be able to put a box that can read it on my desktop in 10 years, it's because I'll be able to control a couple hundred gigs on a server somewhere, or even better, everywhere (like OceanStore), because the cost of the hardware is distributed, much like the internet compared to dialup BBSes of the '80s.
One of the supercool things about the net is that I'm using the latest expensive hardware every day when my packets are routed through gigabit routers and fiber-optic backbones. I don't have to pay for it like I did the long-distance copper wire when I called BBSes across the country.
Storage will continue to follow the same trend, where the terabyte and exabyte drive complexes will serve my storage needs, and not some primitive box I plug into my computer and have to upgrade every year or two.
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
Ok... the house I grew up in is about 110 years old. Some of the windows are the originals. Perhaps some are apt to forget this but, glass is a liquid (albeit an extremely viscous one). Over time, it pours.
Old windows are like that NOT because the glass has "flowed" down over years... but because the methods used to manufacture windows at that time created ones that were thicker on one end, and often slightly rippled. And of course it made more sense for stability to install them with the thicker part downward.
It's all urban legend stuff. So look through the alt.folklore.urban FAQ for details on this.
Besides - there are plenty of people who collect old bottles and the like. My mom does. And there are none of those signs of "flowing" glass, even in some of the REALLY old ones. (As in older than those windows)
I don't believe glass flows at room temperature. At all. And if it does, it's on a much, much longer timescale than what we need to worry about here.
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Then, you could fit the entire world's yearly production of information inside a cube that measured...
cube-root(1.5 million) ~= 115 cm
(OK, so how about we create a couple of these every year, and launch them into space, just in case something goes horribly awry with our planet?)
Holographic storage has been around a long time, and mentioned on /. quite often. However, the substrate life is terrible, and the precision of the lasers involed in writing and reading would be prohibitively expensive to mass produce.
The difference between this and that, is that they store information by writing it onto the same spot from different angles. This is volumetric storage - it's a 3 dimensional grid of points.
Any spoon would be too big.
XFS on my beloved SGI at home does
Max Filesystem size: 18 million TB
Max File size: 9 million TB
That's according to their spec sheet, I could only dream I had 18 exabytes, course then I might need something bigger than an Indigo II, to get good use out of it.
...isn't this what a lot of people complain about with regards to Microsoft: software bloat was made possible by ungodly amounts of hard drive space (or alternately, very inexpensive drives)?
So while I think it's fantastic that these advances are being made, is it really that big of a deal?
Just think... if there was no such thing as MP3s, would your hard drive be bursting at the seams? This is just an example, but there are many things that many people can download now with their broadband connections to quickly fill their (even 75 GB!) drives... porn movies, DiVX, MP3s, you name it.
Now, I'm not really against larger hard drives, but there has to be a tradeoff somewhere. DiVX (and the like) are great, but now with this new technology (hopefully) we'll be able to carry around a credit card or small box with all of our DVDs. I don't really want more space, I want better quality stuff to be stored on that space... I'd rather have DVD quality than DiVX. But if I can get 1 TB in a cubic centimeter, I want something a hell of a lot better than DVD (at least for videos).
Let's just hope the transfer rates will be up to par when this tech finally hits the consumer markets.
XFS on my beloved SGI at home does
Max Filesystem size: 18 million TB
Max File size: 9 million TB
BeOS's BFS, also a 64-bit filesystem, handles 18,000,000 TB hard drives and similarly huge file sizes (aka 18,000 petabytes).
"And like that
Let's examine this, shall we? In my 20+ years working from Hobby to Personal computers these are some observations:
1980 16K was a lot of RAM
2001 64M is the minimum for newer versions of Windows
1980 Few graphics, mostly stored in ROM or derived from ROM code. Applications and games were very small.
2001 Download Netscape and the install is 30M, graphics, sound files, libraries, etc.
1980 Sound was produced by algorithms, some not bad, but hardly music.
2001 Sound is stored in a variety of sampled-compressed formats, rarely derived anymore.
1980 the average user could answer specific questions, and likely write in Basic or Assembler Language
2001 the average user has no clue what device controller they have, let alone program. There's no standard language distributed with Windows.
The average user is looking to use their computer as some enhancement to their life: email/chat, entertainment/games, research/web-surfing, news/finance, etc. They really are an average user, where once the only people with computers were geeks or bleeding edge businessmen trying write inventory programs or balance books in VisiCalc.
Memory capacity, goes up as Average users care more about content than how it's derived. The cache on my laptop ecclipses the entire drive on my old computer, why? Because in the normal day-to-day activity I download hundreds of images, html docs, active server pages, perl scripts, etc. I save a few videos (like Duality) and think nothing of it, because space is nearly infinite. Well, it is for the crummy resolution and sampling rates we're fixated with for the time being, how about 5 years from now? I expect to save and HDTV with THX movie on a disk, along with dozens of others. My 6 Gig. drive won't cut it, maybe a 300Gig drive, but heck, the higher the quality and the more of it, the more capacity we'll need. And like most users, I'm pretty bad at keeping my drive clean of old stuff. So it just piles up and I'll need more space.
Whether or not Gates said 640K ought to be enough, it is a laughable thought, only because our demands of information/communication devices have grown, and not for the geeked out people who live a cool hack, but for average users, which buy PC's by the millions, to do everyday things with.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The artical dosn't spacifically say this, but it appears to be WORM.
Perhaps, someone will write a filesystem that assumes a huge amount of space, but that can only be written to once. Changes to files would be handled with diffs and versioning.
Special care would need to be taken to insure deleted files can be burned out, otherwise this is a law enforcement dream.
Keep in mind that they don't mention the size of the equipment needed to interface with this tiny chunk of glass. While it probably doesn't take up a room or anything, it would also need to bee minimized for any actual space savings.
How would you design a filesystem for a storage device with 1 TB or more? It seems to me that the directory tree concept would become unwieldy, too much stuff would get lost.
Above 1 TB, with multiple processes interacting on the data, it would seem to me that the storage device would start to look like a mini-Internet. Perhaps the "domains" and "search engines" concept could be used. Or is there a better way to design such a filesystem from the ground up?
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The article referenced in this post is a bit short on information, but readers can get a more detailed view of the story from this article.
The technique involved is refered to as resonant hole burning. Rufus Cone and his optical group at MSU have been working on many applications of this technique for years, including optical storage and stabilization of diode lasers (how's 20Hz linewidth for stabilization of a diode laser?) highly accurate clocks, metrology and so forth. Cone has a link to a nice power-point presentaion on his web page.
Cone and his group have been using crystalline materials, while this Japanese group is using glass. The advantage of glass is that the storage medium can be tailored to a specific shape. This abstract, published by the Active Glass Project, indicates other interesting research, including the up-conversion of photons using glass.