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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!"
I wonder
1. how much does that thing heat up
2. how in hell I'm going to back up a terabyte from my laptop. I already have there too many things that I care about (I do backups on cd-rw), but with a terabyte of data I'd better have two of them and go with raid.....
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
20 meg hard drives should be enough for anyone. Anything more will just be wasted.
um..hmm..guess that saying doesn't apply anymore
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
As in, if you use them or more than eight hours a day, do they die within three months like a half-dozen of my "deathstar" drives have done?
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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.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Lets see...a 10GB iPod costs $399 -- that's $39.90 per gigabyte. So extrapolating to 1000 gigabytes...yes...we'll have a $39,900 iPod!
I'll take two of them; just let me find my checkbook. Oh shoot, I must have left it in the McLaren...I just hope it isn't in the Bentley. Well, I'll just have my chauffeur bring it 'round in the helicopter. Do you have a pen I could borrow?
The real question is whether this technology will be better (and cheaper!) than any other high capacity memory when it's (maybe) released in 2008.
I have my hopes pegged on static random access technology that doesn't depend on disk technology. Instant power on and no difference between storage and application memory are likely to be killer technologies.
...how many Libraries of Congress is it?
Double-check what you've posted already, guys, please...
"But always she's the spectre of uncertainty I first endured, then faded, then embraced..."
The first thing that crosses my mind when I see the illustration on the page, is how the heck are they going to be able to keep the head floating just right over the media. Today's drives are nearly perfectly flat to keep an even boundry of air to fly the head. With the pillars dipicted in the illustration, the drive will drag air and create turbulence. Even if the valleys are somehow "filled" in with another material (probably with some sort of plasma vapor depostion process), it is quite possible that the surfaces will not match up quite right. And the filler cannot mess up the magnetic properties of the material, or else this process is nearly pointless.
Unless of course, they just sprinkle some Pixie Dust on it and magically make it work.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
However, another concern I have is with magnetics. Larger capacities mean that more magnetic signals are being clustered into smaller spaces, which would seem to make them more prone to distortion by magnetic forces external (the Earth, electric outlets, sunspots) and internal (SDRAM, the laptop monitor, and nearby signals on the drive itself). It's all well and good that the signals can be packed into the drive, but simultaneous advances in read/write head technology and nanoferris combinatorics in the drive wheel need to occur before we can start realizing data densities of the type we'd seriously drool over.
Although, to tell you the truth, I never thought we'd reach a gigabyte in a desktop system either. However, the economic incentives just don't seem to be a driving force in any PC technology development lately, so I'm guessing it will be a while before we can pick this up at Best Buy.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
If there's one thing I've learned over the years, its that no matter how large my hard drive, I'll quickly learn to fill it up and need more space. So I've got a terabyte of space? I'll start ripping my music CDs as raw audio to ensure the copy of I have on my harddrive is exactly the same as the CD. I'll start copying game cds to my hard drive to minimize that pesky cd-switching. So on and so forth - and you can damn well bet that (bloat/soft)ware writers will find ways to make their programs as large as possible in the same manner. It's the nature of the beast.
If they hurry, I'll actually be able to run Final Fantasy XI!
Wow! Think of how much Warez I could get off the Apple demo systems at Circuit City!
If this coincides with the latest microsoft windows release, there should be at least enough space left for britneyinvegas.jpg.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
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.
An slightly longer article on patterned media was published in Technology Research News back in February 2001. The article goes into more detail about how the technology works and about some of the problems associated with development of it. Linkeroo
...since you'll probably wait a couple of hours for the thing to finish formatting. And imagine backing that sucker up--I know that many don't have backups of our primary drive. Better get a large-capacity medium to do that.
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 $85,000 on CD's, so the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that anyone interested in a portable MP3 player with >1Tb of capacity intend to pirate their music.
You article and thread for which you give a link is referring to the "Millipede" method which is a mechanical method of data storage.
The article this thread is about is a refinement of the magnetic method of data storage.
In all honesty, it sounds like one of those leet haxor people talking.
I g0t me a l33t 1tb RAED dr1ve. I 0wn j00!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I hope they aren't thinking of using the design that the example shows, it's an awfully inefficient use of space... Would be more effective to either make the particles pyramidic, that way you could have an even smaller point for magnetic fields and since it tapers at the tip, less chance for "crosstalk" from one particle to the next... Since we're talking something on a molecular scale, there would probably be less in the way of drag or heat buildup, whereas the cylindrical design is just begging for it...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
"...57,000 songs on an iPod or a terabyte on a laptop size hard drive!"
...or about 28% of my porno collection. : )
As for myself. . . Using pseudo-careful space management, I've never hit a wall with my trusty old 10 Gb drive. --And I regularly use my machine to do significant high-graphics print publishing jobs. Basically, computers have already hit the point where I no longer care how they advance, (just so long as they don't get any more 'user friendly'!). --PC's finally achieved a level of functionality about six years ago where they could do everything I needed quickly, easily at chump-change prices.
And that's the future, baby!
-Fantastic Lad --When is the Phantom Editor going to make a Clone of Clones? I'd love to see that film done right!
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
It's not as though there isn't technology available yet to store all the data you could ever want stored quickly cheaply. Whatever became of holographic and fluorescent read/write CD technology?
They had working models of those machines, for crying out loud! They had manufacturers lined up to produce the various chemicals and parts to make it a go. I was reading emails from a fellow who was running a demo of a desk-top version nearly five years ago.
And let's face it; even the top of the line computer which even makes a brief ice-berg appearance in the standard news forums is ancient technology by any number of arbitrary standards.
Or NOT arbitrary, I mean.
--We're a bunch of consumer monkeys bouncing around waiting for the next big thing, but we'll only get it when the powers that be decide we're good and ready. --Wouldn't want people to have computers which didn't waste a billion otherwise useful hours per year. Oh no! Computers which don't suck up attention by the gallon might allow people to use their time NOT being distracted by all the insane shit going down around their ears these days! Between television, computers and game boxes, people are pretty much doped up right-smart-good! Opiate of the masses, indeed. Bah.
Terabyte this.
-Fantastic Lad
I've made myself a terabyte fileserver a while ago, everything's raid-5 so there's redundant data incase one of the 160gb drives crashes. I wouldn't want to use a single gb drive, imagine yourself collecting a lot of data and then that single drive crashes, all of that work would be for nothing. I got firewire installed on it so the speed is really fast for other computers.
Another thing is you have to be very tidy with your archive, otherwise such a big drive is going to be very messy.
I found myself smiling at this post, and then I noticed the score +2: Insightful.
I thought it was just a joke. Was it? Don't know if I should laugh or cry at RIAA's foolishness if it's true...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Hm...
:)
:-)
1 Tb is 10^12 bytes right? Ok, not exactly, but the correct magnitude?
1 * 10^12 / 57 * 10^3 = 17,543,859 bytes/song.
So it seems the author is using 17 Mb mp3's or something... Must be one of those "wooo i need l33t 640kbps mp3z cuz 256kbps dont r0x0rz".
Or it's just an approximation.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Somebody had to.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
from the pleasant-daydream dept.
You obviously don't work for the RIAA, do you?
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)
I could easily consume 1.2 TB in a consumer device, but that would only hold the 200 DVDs I currently own. I think I'd need at least 2.5 to 3 TB to make it worth while and to include my CDs and a little future storage space. Of course, with HD now "live," I see a need for a HD server in the next 4 to 7 years which could easily surpass 4 to 5 TB in size.
I have no fear about "too much" storage. It's a shame these devices are mechanical, though, as the reliability and complexity tends to place a large fixed price (esp in a consumer device) before the first bit can be placed.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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?
Two terabytes gives you a thousand hours of video, ten thousand hours of audio. It becomes hard to find and use that many hours, even with the best indexing schemes.
They always tout new and wonderful cars and boats and airplanes and tools and anything else that sounds fantastic, with absolutely no distinction as to the degree of possibility.
Welcome to the WonderfulWeirdWeb's online Popular Science.
Infuriate left and right
...clearing the path for future versions of Windows.
We use them?
I've had one 75GXP die on me (it took 11months so you might still have your fun ahead of you) and the one I got in replacment is dying as we speak (read errors). I was burning a woody ISO when I suddenly heard weird noises... well, that drive I've only had for three months and it was only manufactured some FOUR months ago according to the sticker!
All that "not enough cooling, bla, bla bla" is just pure bullshit, this is happening despite of anything you try to do to avoid it.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Forget about the cost of the player (which will always be around C$500). The proposed new tariffs in MP3 players will add $21,000 to the cost!
Fundamental mistake being made here by the CPCC: You can't base a fixed tariff on something that is as dynamic as Moore's law.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
all you need to do is become one of their customers.
I thought that IBM had gotten out of the hard drive business? Are they going to build a new startup?
I suppose that there could be a bit of latency in the time-to-print cycle, and that might explain it. (Or perhaps it was General Electric that they sold their business to?)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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...
I guess this means my shiny new DVD burner is already obsolete. Backing up my desktop to 4.7gb DVD-RW discs was decent, but now if I end up with a TB or two on my raid array, I'll have to find another backup system. And no, tapes don't cut it, nor does carrying an extra pair of hard drives around. Where's that 155tb optical disc we've been hearing about for the last ten years ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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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