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Atomic Scale Memory
maddugan writes "Technology Research News is reporting that researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison have put the theoretical to the test by using single silicon atoms to represent the 1s and 0s of computing. This is equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material."
I wonder how long it'll be before the *AA asks for a tax on atoms "to offset the costs of piracy".
"7,800 DVDs ought to be enough for anybody" - loconet 2002
[alk]
Only half joking: Researchers at U.Michigan hope to
store up to 10 bits per atom, by using Rydberg states.
http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1999/split/pn
>:K
>;k
A better prediction would be that there will soon be 20 posts about how this new technology will allow folks to enlarge their pr0n collections by a factor of 10,000. I'll bet they're rolling in even as I type.
Steve
This isn't actually very useful : what we want is atomic scale logic gates, not data storage. In fact I'd venture to say that this technology is NOT what we will be using in the future for extremely dense memory. Why? Because its 2 dimensional and requires an independent readout head (that is MECHANICAL). Making it work anywhere but a vacuum may be impossible. (though that is not a real problem : making a disk drive that has an internal vacuum is quite feasible) A solution that is thousands, even millions of times faster would be a system that reads itself : i.e. a 3 dimensional array of logic gates to form a molecular version of ram. In addition, you could cram far more bits per gram of material used for the media. (I can't say per square inch because that would be misleading) In addition, storage capacity is not what our computers need more of : its performance (especially in accessing all those gigs of storage).
Techie: Um, we've lost the corporate file server.
Boss: You mean it crashed?
Techie: No, it's working fine. We just can't find it.
Also, you could store the contents of:
149 200GB Fluid Bearing WD HDDs
45850 CDs
116400 256MB Flash Memory Cards
298000 Zip Disks
931300 32MB Memory Sticks
OR!!! 20696000 1.44MB Floppies
No offence guys, but come on. Post meaningful figures.
Its actually 250 trillion bits per square inch.
28.42 TB per square inch.
Now thats impressive.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
"from the quarks-coming-next dept."
Dude, quarks have a hard enough time remembering where they are themselves! Why would you expect them to remember stuff for us as well?
First off, if this is widely used, won't this
be expensive?
A small fraction of a cents in gold per 1000 terabytes. Your computer already has much more gold in it than one of these would require.
I realize that these are gold MOLECULES,
Gold ATOMS.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I dunno. I measure everything in football fields.
In 1959 Richard Feynman said that all the information accumulated in all the books in the world could theoretically fit in a cube 1/200th of an inch on a side.
You can read the transcipt of the speech from when he made that prediction.
Feynman worked on developing the atomic bomb, he won a nobel in physics and is known as much for his scientific research as for his story telling.
________________
All my sig are fjdklafjkldafjkldafdaklf
this has for porn collecting?!?! It may soon become possible for the individual to afford enough storage, to have every single piece of pornography ever created by human beings since the beginning of time.
I have no words.
When DVDs are burned and read, you don't simply read raw data off. The information is, of course, encoded. The DVD (and CD for that matter) specification says to use Reed-Solmon encoding. Saving the long math, RS encoding is about the most advanced error-correcting scheme that can be implemented in low-cost hardware today. By encoding data this way, your DVD (or CD) can become fairly scratched, but still play. RS protects against multiple-point errors. However, there is a price to pay - for every ~33k byte block on a DVD, almost 5K bytes are used in the parity checks for the DVD. See this file for more gritty details about DVDs. This means your 4.7GB DVD really holds about 5.48 GB of raw data.
Now, why is this relevant? Harddrives use their own error correcting schemes too. Manufacturers have the luxury of creating their own encoding systems since they're the ones that provide the read/write mechanisms. You can't pull the platter out of one harddrive and stick it in another. Hard drives typically use CRC (cyclic redundancy check) encoding schemes. I know you have all gotten CRC errors on a floppy way back when - that's what it stands for. Anyway, CRC is much less efficent when you compare the protected data to parity information ratios. While I wasn't able to pull the actual numbers from the Internet or my old math books, you can find a discussion and sample math here.
When you boil it down and relate all this information to our magical harddrive, the maximum usable density of the data would hover between 85%, or 6630 DVDs/in^2, to 60%, a measly 4680 DVDs/in^2, of the listed capacity. This is all assuming that the ideal lab conditions are maintained for a consumer level product.
As always, beware what the numbers tell you. However, if this can fly, then it would be an awesome step forward. Once you get Windows 2010 installed, you might even have a few Gig to play around with!