Ferroelectric Storage Density Tops 20KDVDs/Cubit^2

DeAshcroft writes "As reported in Technology Research News, researchers from Tohoku University, the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science, and Pioneer Corporation have demonstrated a prototype ferroelectric (as opposed to ferromagnetic) storage mechanism with density of 1.5 trillion dots per square inch. No word on why Japanese researchers are using square inches, but the new storage benchmark is the DVD. This is 47 DVD's in a square inch, or over 20KiloDVD's per square cubit. Original paper appeared in the Applied Physics Letters." In related memory news, an Anonymous Coward writes "It appears the the ever present pause between photo's on a digital camera might finally be fixed. A company now claims http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/102/C1396/ ) to have kicked up the write speed on a compact flash card up to 4MB/sec. This means we lesser photographers can now get the right action shot just by volume alone ;-)"

Comments

What?!?

[trotski]

They measure storage density in DVDs now?!?

Re:What?!?

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Why not? Remember when we measured everything in terms of floppies? I still remember being told that a CD could hold as much data as 444 floppies. (A number like that tends to stick in the old brain.)

Re:Is this really important?

[isorox]

Do we really need that much storage?

$GENERIC_QUOTE_640K

Video takes up a lot. Try storing multi-channel (multiple camera angles) uncompessed HDTV, gigs soon add up. Mix in some form of holographic projection and a dash of libraries of congress and you eat up terrabytes.

Re:many applications

[the_2nd_coming]

to make it able to be considered for secondary storage they have to increase the read speed.

Re:Is this really important?

[Max Romantschuk]

Most people don't. Anyone doing video or audio stuff do.

I make music in my spare time. All the source files, sample libraries and raw audio of one single track won't fit on a CD anymore, even though the final track will only be something like a five megabyte mp3/ogg.

Storage is like money, if you have enough you don't think about it too much. That way you end up with more time to do what you really want to :)

Takes an afwull lot of time to write...

[giel]

Please correct me if I'm wrong:

3TB = (aprox.) 3.000.000.000.000 (12 zero's)
25kB/s = (aprox.) 25.000

3.000.000.000.000/25.000
= 1.200.000 seconds (to write a DVD sized medium)
= 20000 hours
= 833 days
= 2 years and 4 months!!!

WHAT!?

Well sounds kinda usefull...

Re:Square cubit?

[hcdejong]

Actually, for the simple reason that they're what the technological world was built on, and also the not-inconsequential fact that English units often tend to relate to the real-world better than thier Metric/SI counterparts.

Actually, this is a typical case of YMMV. If you've been using Imperial units all your life, SI units will seem awkward and unnatural. But it's the same the other way around. Your story can be reversed, situated in a Metric country, and it'll still be true.

Another good example of the oh-so-awkward size of metric units is the liters/100km unit that has to be used to measure fuel econonomy in reasonably sized numbers

Incorrect. It's perfectly feasible to use the 1 liter in x kilometers metric (abbreviated to 1:x). Which even yields an easy rule-of-thumb conversion to/from mpg: 10 mpg = 1:3.

And talk about awkward. How many feet go into a mile? How many lbs into a ton? With a bazillion conversion factors to choose from (rather than the trivial move-the-decimal-point operation needed with metric units), it's a miracle the Industrial Revolution got off the ground at all.

the recent NASA Mars probe debacle only happened when one group deviated from accepted industry practice...

This isn't an argument in favor of using Imperial measurements, it's an argument in favor of standardizing. The US is one of IIRC three holdouts [*] on adopting the SI (the acronym isn't accidental). Give it up!

*: Talk about the Axis of Evil...

Re:Is this really important?

[MrResistor]

Some other responses have mentioned video, but let me add some real numbers to that. I'm a technician doing customer service repair on storage systems for high end digital video production systems.

One of our high end systems uses 10 73GB drives. Yes I know that there are bigger drives out there, but for video bandwidth, and therefore rotation speed, is very important, as is stability. Tons of storage space is pretty meaningless if there are hiccups in your video stream.

Anyway, these are arranged in 2 RAID-3 LUNs, which basically means 8 drives for storage and 2 drives for parity (error-correction). That gives 584GB of storage, which translates into just under 25 hours of high quality standard definition (NTSC) compressed (MPEG-2) video with stereo sound. How's that for eating up storage?

At the moment I don't deal with HDTV, but I would estimate of the cuff that HD would cut that space down to the 8-10 hour range. Even though my company now offers a solution based on 181G drives (for about 1.5TB of storage!) that only brings that up to around 24 hours worth, which really isn't much when you consider that for many productions one hour of source material for 2 minutes of final product is considered a pretty good ratio. That means that 1.5TB could be eaten up with just the source material for a single one hour show!