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!"

Comments

cool. I mean, hot

[kipple]

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.....

Re:cool. I mean, hot

[commodoresloat]

1. how much does that thing heat up

It gets hella hot with the amount of pr0n you can fit on a terabyte!

No one needs a hard drive that big

[Anonymous Coward]

20 meg hard drives should be enough for anyone. Anything more will just be wasted.

What about the fine print?

[ErikTheRed]

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?

Ok, wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Yawn

[Com2Kid]

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.

1TB iPod

[i1984]

I can't wait for my 1 terabyte iPod!

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.

That's great, but...

[chasec]

...how many Libraries of Congress is it?

Posted previously.

[Wohali]

Double-check what you've posted already, guys, please...

RAED

[DarkHelmet]

So, considering how expensive this is, shouldn't putting these puppies in parallel be instead RAED? (Redundant Array of Expensive Drives)?

In all honesty, it sounds like one of those leet haxor people talking.

I g0t me a l33t 1tb RAED dr1ve. I 0wn j00!

Circular?

[NeuroManson]

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...

Re:Circular?

[clark625]

You would think that a pyramid would be a neat advance, but it's probably not feasable. The costs associated currently are too high for consideration.

The problem with pyramids is the formation. Hard drive manufacturers like to use Si, polymers, metals, and the like. Doing a photolithography step on them isn't difficult--but finding an etchant that will prefer to etch in a pyramidal shape is rather tough. If you can find one, it usually will etch down such that you end up with pyramids facing into the substrate.

Not that it can't be done. I recall some work done creating pyramids on GaAs substrates. It may be extendable to other material systems as well. But GaAs is a zincblend crystal structure--not a diamond structure like Si is. The zincblend readily makes itself agreeable to off-axis etching (especially if you get the proper offcut wafer).

Maybe if the polymer could be self-assembling and would itself produce the desired pyramidal shapes, then everyone would be happy. Doing a metalization step over top of that would not be difficult at all. But I'm not terribly great at dealing with polymers--I don't know where the limits of self-assembly are. I'm sure someone else does, though--and I know of several journal papers you might consider.
Anyways--your idea is good, but it's an ideal. At this moment, there doesn't really exist a practical way to make metalized pyramids without steps that would either be prohibitively expensive (I'm talking processing time here), or steps that would require too large of feature size.

...57,000 songs...

[Burning1]

"...57,000 songs on an iPod or a terabyte on a laptop size hard drive!"

...or about 28% of my porno collection. : )

Security implications?

[CProgrammer98]

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!

working with 1Tb

[Sarin]

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.

Re:How much capacity is 57,000 songs?

[Jugalator]

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. :-)

Removable storage, anyone ?

[billcopc]

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 ?