IBM Reinvents Punch Cards

grim_thing writes "I.B.M. scientists say they have created a data-storage technology that can store the equivalent of 200 CD-ROM's on a surface the size of a postage stamp. Writing in the current issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, researchers at I.B.M.'s laboratories in Zurich report that they have achieved a storage density of one trillion bits of data per square inch, about 25 times as great as current hard disks." Reuters also has a story.

Comments

Re:Interesting

[jscribner]

It will definitely be different, and it's got some cool advantages. The announcement from IBM Research labs in Zurich talk about a data storage density 20 times that of today's best magnetic storage. Briefly, tiny V shaped heads make holes 10 nanometers wide in a plastic film - there are a number of interesting stats and potential applications described in the article, as well as some animations (1,2). The story is also reported in The NY Times and C|Net.

IBM Zurich website

[Anonymous Coward]

the IBM Zurich lab website has more info: Millipede home page

Re:confused

[freeweed]

200 cd-roms is (roughly) 120Gb. On something smaller than a microdrive. Space-wise, you're talking over 100 times more efficient.

Re:No wonder they're dumping the hard drive sector

[Cletus the yokel]

Seriously... doesn't this announcement come at a strange time, when IBM plans to phase out it's IDE hard drives in the short term...

Yup... I don't think IBM would've given up 40 years of technical leadership in hard-drive technology if it hadn't already seen the writing on the wall. In the short term, hard drives have become a commodity business and it's been harder and harder for IBM (and others) to squeeze a profit from the business. Long term, hard drives are a buggy-whip business - a technological dead-end. That's why IBM has poured so much money into basic research on quantum devices and molectronics.

Permanent storage?

[Cesaro]

This might be just what is need to get permanent storage. The life expectency of most media we have around today is fairly short in terms of it's overall data rentention capabilities.

Taking these storage units, mounting them on something sturdy and sealing them in a vacuum container to prevent corrosion or breakdown and now the life of your data is incredibly longer.

Re:reliability of millipede?

[ynohoo]

From the article:

To erase data, a hot tip is passed over the dent, causing it to pop up:

from the IBM Research Site:

To over-write data, the tip makes a series of offset pits that overlap so closely their edges fill in the old pits, effectively erasing the unwanted data. More than 100,000 write/over-write cycles have demonstrated the re-write capability of this concept.

*sarcasm* Has Jon Katz started writing for the NYT?

NYT figures are dead wrong

[return 42]

NYT: "I.B.M.'s holes are . . . half of a billionth of an inch across."

Um, no. That would be about 1/8 the size of an atom. They also say the storage medium is "a layer of plexiglass a couple of billionths of an inch thick". That would be 1/2 the size of an atom, which is quite remarkable considering that plexiglass is a polymer.

Reuters: "[The] holes are 10 nanometers. . ."

Much more credible. That's about 100 atoms across.

Why am I not surprised that no one at the Times caught this?

Re:possible use...

[darthBear]

Nuclear weapons are only one way to generate an EMP blast. Conventional explosives and even capacitor banks can also be used, albeit a less powerful signal but still an EMP.

Furthermore the weapon that would be used with the intent of generating an EMP would probably not be much more than 1kt. Locally the effects would be disasterous but the world kept going after an 11kt and 21kt bomb in 1945. In fact with modern building standards and the fact that the bomb would be detonated in the atmosphere it is possible that the physical damage on the ground would be quite slight.

That being said its still a nuke and hopefully they are never used again but I suspect that if they were the result of that one bomb would be less dire than you would have us believe.

Re:One trillion ...blah blah ....say what?

[ThaReetLad]

umm thats 116Gb per square inch

for comparison the GXP 120 has a maximum density of 29.7 Gigabits per square inch

29,700,000,000 bits
~3,712,500,000 bytes
~3,625,488 Kb
~3,540 Mb
~3.45 Gb per square inch

116/3.45 is 33 times greater than the density of a GXP 120.

*Working* URL

[Anonymous Coward]

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkrese arch.nsf/pages/storage297.html#one

fixed. He accidentally put a space in there somewhere in "thinkresearch." :)