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A Terabyte of Data on a Laptop Hard Drive
KaosConMan writes: "TechnologyReview.com has an article describing a new technique being developed by General Electric and IBM to further decrease the size needed to magnetically store data. This new technique could produce 150 gigabits per square centimeter-- that's ~57,000 songs on an iPod or a terabyte on a laptop size hard drive!"
Is there some kind of inside joke at Slashdot I'm not aware of? I've been reading /. for years, and no one told me about this. Probably two or three times a month, there's an article about a new processor that's going to run a million times faster than everything we have now, and will take up the space of a 'AA' battery without producing any heat, or, there's an article about a new data storage technique that's going to fit a trillion TBytes within an area the size of an Red Penguin cinnamons box, and will cost about as much as a can of diet coke.
Will someone please let me in on the joke?
AC thus spoke:
This is already obsolete. Terabytes of information on a creditcard sized medium have been announced years ago.
And it was replied:
Along with anti-gravity, ways to earn infinate money, and the secret of eternal youth.
The only difference is that this announcement comes from an actual lab with people who have actual degrees.
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the ball bearing cartel has very strong connections.
Who run Barter Town?
Here is an interesting question: How much computer data storage would be required to hold every single type of media created by humans in their whole history of being. I am talking about every single movie, every song, every written work, all the books, all the newspapers & magazines. All the folklore and tales. All the mathematical and scinetific journals. All the philosophical and poetic works.....everything!
Keeping in mind that it would be compressed to afford maximum storage with minimal loss of quality using all forms of compression available today. It boggles my mind to think of all the works that we humans have produced. All that information.
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
This new technique could produce 150 gigabits per square centimeter-- that's ~57,000 songs on an iPod or a terabyte on a laptop size hard drive!"
In related news, the RIAA was said to be pushing Congress to make sale of portable MP3 players with >1Tb capacity illegal, citing the widespread increase of piracy which would follow as evidence the devices couldn't possibly be used legally.
RIAA representatives pointed out at a press conference late this afternoon that an iPod capable of storing 57,000 songs would mean the purchase of 4750 CD's (Averaging 12 tracks/disc), coming out to a total of over $85,000 (At $18/disc). Clearly, representatives stated, no consumer would spend $85,000 on CD's, so the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that anyone interested in a portable MP3 player with >1Tb of capacity intend to pirate their music.
You article and thread for which you give a link is referring to the "Millipede" method which is a mechanical method of data storage.
The article this thread is about is a refinement of the magnetic method of data storage.
The article states that the new technology will only use one magnetic grain per bit as opposed to the hundreds currently used.
I wonder if this means that once a cluster is overwritten, there is no ghosting effect that could allow the previous data to be retrieved. Once the data's gone, it's gone. A single magnetic grain can only be set one way!
So NSA or whoever won't be able to retrieve those docs you wiped just before they busted into your home/office....
In the light of this, this tech. it is probably not in the security industry's best interest!
So as well as getting space for all your music and porn, you don't have to worry about the data persisting on your drive when you want to remove it... all in all a good thing!
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
57,000 songs * 3 minutes / song * 1 hour / 60 minutes * 1 day / 24 hours = 118+ days of continuous 24-hour music
(a) When, exactly, are you going to listen to all this? Not to mention collect it?
(b) Don't you think the critical part of the system might be something other than storage space? Like, say, the battery?
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
The higher you climb, the further you fall. But in this case, the more you store, the more you will lose.
Every time hard drive storage gets denser, we further space ourselves away from effective means to make archival backups of this huge amount of data we are carrying around. While your MP3 collection might be expendable, a week's worth of digital photos might not be. Or any other data you can imagine.
When is a cost-effective 1 TB DLT drive going to come to market?
With such extremely compact data, the thing I would most worry about is a scratch, such as bumping you TB-laptop while accessing: Instantly you have a couple GB of bad sectors! Oh, the pain. Just pray that it hits a clean spot...
For those of you who are saying that a terrabyte is a rediculous amount of data storage: Forget not that a 10MB hard disk was once considered massive. Today, you couldn't hope to put most programs into that amount of space! Not to mention those of us who have a tendency to hoarde mp3's and DivX's (myself included). Hell, my current project is a machine that spec's an even terrabyte of disk space! It would be very convenient IMHO if i could simply drop in one hard drive and have it done. (As opposed to spending hours configuring 10 100GB drives in some type of RAID)
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