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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.
I'd have thought that most of the optical media, such as CD-ROM, was the spirtual, if not linear, descendant of punch cards. Only difference is how many holes, the idea of spinning for faster access, and using a "las-er" instead of some form of mechanical armature.
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What if one's data contains dimpled chads? How will those bits be counted?
You are not the customer.
So, that would be 120Gb in the size of a postage stamp. Not bad. Even if it takes a long time to write and longer to read back, this could wipe out tape archival for most backup purposes!
So, is the data stored in blocks of 25 rows of 80 columns? This will be handy for FORTH systems without file systems, and FORTRAN IV,66 and 77 programmers.
Stick Men
They just sold their Hard disk unit to hitachi. And a few days later they report a new storage format.
Makes you think...
just thinkin
I want 2D games back.
Since there isn't a whole lot of details about this technology and exactly when it will show up in store shelves, it's kind of hard to guess IBM's plans for this technology. How plausible is it that IBM has something totally knew to replace HD technology and this is just another related development. Whether this can/could/should/would replace HD is hard to say without real data, but it might provide a clue. IBM might have some other bleeding edge technology lined up for mass storage, which lead to the development of this product?
Can we get that translated into a tandard measurement, like Library's of Congress?
I seems every couple of months one of these "new storage breakthrough" comes along. What happens to them? Where do they go? It seems like these things have yet to make it into consumer (or even "professional") technology. Have heard a lot about high density solid state storage, and stuff like that, yet I still have a platter spinning at 7200RPM next to my feet. Arn't we a little outdated by other technology standards using spinning pieces of metal to store our information, with no end in sight?
These things are cool, but they become science breakthroughs, not news for nerds...stuff that matters? Do breakthroughs like this really matter to us? I am asking this because I really don't know. Where have semi-recent "Breakthroughs" like this made it into consumer technology that you and I can buy today? Or next year?
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
His holes are 10 nanometers ... and about 3 billion of them fit in a punch card hole
I read the news today, oh boy
4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancastershire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall
I'd love to turn you on
I'd hate to drop a deck of punch cards that size. You'd need a microscope to put them back in order.
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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.
JS - IBM Metaverse devteam
The opinions expressed here are mine & not necessarily representative of IBM
Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen are crying ...
200 cd-roms is (roughly) 120Gb. On something smaller than a microdrive. Space-wise, you're talking over 100 times more efficient.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
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.
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Does this mean that the people who are running these old systems can finally upgrade?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
sPh
Why does this sound like the Google Page Ranking System based on Pigeon Technology?
I don't know, there may be some prior art here.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
1984: Wow! Twenty megabytes! I'll never use all this space! ... Ah, screw it.
1988: Wow! Eighty megabytes! I'll never use all this space!
1994: Wow! A gigabyte! I'll never use all this space!
1999: Uh, wow. Twenty gigabytes? I don't think I'll ever use all this space.
2002: A hundred and twenty gigs? I... hm.
2005:
How short do you think the life cycle is on these things? You're looking at a minimum of 5 to 10 years for most lab findings to make it to market. And don't forget, the all-mighty economy comes into play too. If it can't be produced cheaply enough in large enough quantities, it just becomes, "research results upon which other research is based on"
The toys you're using now are the result of announcements made a long time ago. It's just that our memories are short. I remember many years ago when WORM drives first came out - ooh...1GB of storage - so what if you can only write it once, you'll never run out of that much space, *drool* *slaver*... Now I have a desk covered in CD's, half of which are from AOL...
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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?
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.
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You could make it:
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or
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or...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Back around '79 or so, I remember hearing a COBOL trainer (in a corporate setting) assert that in the next century, there would be a language called COBOL, even if there was not way of knowing what it would evolve (or maybe the word is mutate) into. By now, I feel pretty secure in seconding his notion that COBOL, the Legacy Language from Heck, is never gonna fade away. (In fact, as a career option I'm weighing COBOL as a language to concentrate on.) IBM apparently feels the same way, so it's not too surprising that they'd come up with a whole new way to archive all those billions of lines of code in the handy, familiar 80x25 format.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
. . . about 25 times as great as current hard disks.
All right, so how much denser is it than punch cards?
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You are right that my numbers (10 years development, 99% chance of failure) are wild guesses - based on 35 years of watching promising new technologies move, or usually not, from the labs. Lots of unexpected problems turn up in trying to commercialize new technology, so most new developments die without ever being produced. If it gets past that hurdle, it will still die in the market unless it is much better than existing technologies, which haven't been standing still while all the problems are worked out. For example, bubble memory once sounded this good relative to competing technology (almost as fast as semiconductor RAM, nonvolatile, and might have been cheaper than disk drives), but by the time it was actually in mass production, semiconductor RAM was much faster and cheaper, while hard drives had shrunk from the size of washing machines to small enough for PC's, became cheaper and more capacious than bubble and not too much slower. There weren't enough applications where bubble was definitely better to support efficient mass production, so it was soon priced right out of the market.
Judging from this report, they haven't taken the first steps to commercializing the hole memory. They are writing and reading with a scanning electron microscope - a lab instrument that probably costs six figures. And they are writing 1,000 times slower than a modern hard drive. It would be nice to have a full backup of the server farm fit on a credit card, but not if it takes days to complete the backup... They need to move it to a purpose-built machine, solve the speed problem, get the cost way down, standardize formats, and get the drives and cartridges on the market. Sounds like ten years - if it is possible to solve the cost and the speed problems in the same machine. Using 1,000 heads instead of one would solve the speed problem _today_, but it sure doesn't help the cost issue. And by the time they are ready to market it, what will they be competing against?
Judging from this report, they haven't taken the first steps to commercializing the hole memory. They are writing and reading with a scanning electron microscope - a lab instrument that probably costs six figures. And they are writing 1,000 times slower than a modern hard drive. It would be nice to have a full backup of the server farm fit on a credit card, but not if it takes days to complete the backup... They need to move it to a purpose-built machine, solve the speed problem, get the cost way down, standardize formats, and get the drives and cartridges on the market. Sounds like ten years - if it is possible to solve the cost and the speed problems in the same machine. Using 1,000 heads instead of one would solve the speed problem _today_, but it sure doesn't help the cost issue. And by the time they are ready to market it, what will they be competing against?
The core of the Millipede project is a two-dimensional array of v-shaped silicon cantilevers that are 0.5 micrometers thick and 70 micrometers long. At the end of each cantilever is a downward-pointing tip less than 2 micrometers long. The current experimental setup contains a 3 mm by 3 mm array of 1,024 (32 x32) cantilevers, which are created by silicon surface micromachining. A sophisticated design ensures accurate leveling of the tip array with respect to the storage medium and dampens vibrations and external impulses. Time-multiplexed electronics, similar to that used in DRAM chips, address each tip individually for parallel operation. Electromagnetic actuation precisely moves the storage medium beneath the array in both the x- and y-directions, enabling each tip to read and write within its own storage field of 100 micrometers on a side. The short distances to be covered help ensure low power consumption.
While current data rates of individual tips are limited to the kilobits-per-second range, which amounts to a few megabits for an entire array, faster electronics will allow the levers to be operated at considerably higher rates. Initial nanomechanical experiments done at IBM's Almaden Research Center showed that individual tips could support data rates as high as 1 - 2 megabits per second.
Sounds like they are not reading with a TEM but with real devices, the speed problems have already been adressed, as well as power considerations. The only thing left is cost =)
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