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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 ;-)"
Yeah, who else who measure in inches except the US and porn stars ?
At least right now what type of applications would this be good for? Do we really need that much storage? Perhaps if programmers wrote better code........... Then again remember when 2megs of memory was "the bomb" ?
They measure storage density in DVDs now?!?
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
sure, that sounds like a lot of storage, but how many full-length german sheizer films can it hold? when will we start setting standards that are actually meaninful?
Cubit^2
This sounds like an achievement of biblical proportions!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
What the hell, is God telling them to build an ark?
For those of you using sane units, this is about 250 gigabits per cm^2.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I hope that they could use several head in parallel at the same time to increase the reading speed and also (why not?) the writing speed.
If I remember well, a company has already done this for CD-ROM, it was reading several track at the same time, they had a commercial product but I don't know if it sold well.
I wonder why it hasn't be done with HDD?
Note that I'm not talking about multiple heads (too expensive), but using one head to read/write several tracks at the same time.
...gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I like it.
Really now, the Japanese are using square inches because Americans know what a square inch is, and they do a lot of business with the USA. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Also, they just happened to reach a "milestone" of 1.5 when measured in square inches. 1 square inch = 6.4516 square centimeters, so this is only about 0.235 per square centimeter. Maybe they should have a press release at 0.3/cm^2. But if it's less than 1, it's just not very good.
To resolve this issue, I propose the introduction of a new unit based on the meter and corrected by a factor based on Moore's law or whatever it is that governs storage density. The correction factor should be adjusted to allow for press releases oh... say... every 3 months so that stock traders will have something to speculate about. I propose that the new units be called "Horcs" in honor of no particular person, place or thing.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The recoring area of a DVD is 14 square inches. So the density of this new recording technique is 14*47=658 times greater than a DVD.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
(assuming 4.7 GB DVD's)
What I'd be interrested in is knowing how fast it reads, preferably in another sane measurement, like 8" floppies per forthnight.
First, they're only currently able to read 25kB/s. Yes, 25 kilobytes per second. They think they can bump up the read speed to 3.75MB/s. But it's the write speed that's curious. The prototype writes at 2.5MB/s, and they estimate they can bump it up to 125MB/s. A medium we can write to faster than we can read!
Second, their goal is 667 terabits per cm^2. Yep, about 2667 times more dense than the 250 gigabits per cm^2 they're claiming.
Are those cubits persianroyalcubits, northerncubits, irishcubits, greekcubits, hebrewcubits, homericcubits, olympiccubits, sumeriancubits, egyptianroyalcubits, blackcubits, shortgreekcubits, biblicalcubits, egyptianshortcubits, romancubits, assyriancubits or hashimicubits ??
Using the prototype, the researchers were able to read 25 kilobytes, or thousand bytes, of data per second, said Cho. This is relatively slow -- it would take 10 seconds to retrieve a 250-page book at that speed, assuming 1,000 characters per page. It is possible to increase the read speed to 3.75 megabytes per second, said Cho. This would make it possible to retrieve the information contained in about 150 books in 10 seconds. Current disk drives have read speeds of about 20 to 50 megabytes, or million bytes, per second.
So about 36 novels/hour.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
For those of you using sane units, this is about 250 gigabits per cm^2.
;-)
That's 2,412.1 petanybbles per acre, for those of you who prefer units with a little character.
I write in my journal
It's not so much the amount of memory that is important but about how small a package we can fit it in. This will allow tablet PCs and other PDA styled devices to have what the desktop PC world takes for granted. Also imagine the costs savings from application like outer space computing (every pound going up costs a fortune right?). Give people time and you'd be surprised what uses they'll come up with.
Me, pr0n.
So, is all this for real?
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Ferroelectric density: 1.5Tb/in^2
8 bits to a byte -> 187.5GB/in^2
Hitachi's (formerly IBM's) 180GXP line packs 60GB to a platter. According to their data sheet, that is 45.5Gb/in^2. Convert to GB, and we have ~5.69GB/in^2.
When common HD technology reaches Ferroelectric technology, we'll have about 6TB in a top-of-the-line IDE drive.
If you want a little character, that should be 2.035e-2 Library of Congresses per cm^2. ;-)
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Let's see,I used to know what a cubit was. Well, don't you worry about that, get some wood, build it.
When cubits get to small we can start measuring things in "arks".
KFG
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
His lab is here. Please try to stagger your access so you don't slashdot him.
The Japanese side of the main Phonon Device Lab has pdf'd scans of newspaper articles from September 10. The Japanese also uses 1.4 Terabits/sq. inch.
A drawing on the bottom of this page shows that his ultimate goal of 4 Petabits/square inch is based on a bit being stored in a 0.4 nanometer square, the size of one BaTiO3 crystal.
Interesting experiment on his page tells you in English how to make piezoelectric ceramics(in collaboration with Washington U.).
It looks like there are a whole raft of people from Tohoku U. at U. Washington doing nano-bio research, mems, piezoelectrics.. maybe sq. inch came from Washington. Their Center for Nanotechnology looks neat.
I wonder if they were involved in this storage technology development.
Why the US still clings to imperial units is beyond me.
Duh. It's because Americans still measure everything in shitloads.
Or about 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits per square parsec.
That's 31 zeros.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Girl And then I was like.. replay..., and he was like... replay... So I was like replay of Girl saying 'duh'...
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...
giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
Yes, it is important. Because applications won't grow to fit the need if there is no room to grow. Yeah, I do remember when 2MB of memory was the bomb, I paid an extra $200 for that extra MB when I bought my 386DX-33. I had the best hard drive too, 80MB. Now I have 3x+ that in memory.
I see your point, but look where things have gone in the last ... damn, has it been 12 years already?! I don't think you can blame programmers for writing worse code. Look at what the code of today is capable of, versus the code of 1991. Wolfenstein 3d vs Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
No, we don't need the space right now, but we will find new and interesting ways to fill it if it is there. Imagine not having to uninstall your OS, just create a new 100GB partition, install the new OS to it, and boot to that one instead of the old one. We have gotten used to having to uninstall software because we have limited space to deal with. Think of all the things we wouldn't have to do if we had "unlimited" nearly instant-access disk space.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Why the US still clings to imperial units is beyond me.
:-)
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.
This is NOT just an artifact caused by familiarity: For ordinary use, the English units are often just more convenient because thier sizes are more applicable to the problem at hand. For instance, in machining and design of precision parts, thousandths of an inch turn out to be considerably more useful than metric units, just simply because of the mechanics of material removal using common machining processes. This is one reason almost all machining in high-precision industries like Aerospace and Oil/Petrochemical/Energy is still done in English units. (Note that the recent NASA Mars probe debacle only happened when one group deviated from accepted industry practice of using English measurements and switched to Metric. (And without even telling anyone, at that!) The simple reason the error was not caught is that no idiot (except maybe a French idiot, they still haven't got over thier Napoleonic pride in the moronic Metric system) would use metric measurements in an aerospace context - it's just not done.)
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. Ugh. There are dozens of other examples.
Units are somewhat arbitrary, but to be honest, in my engineering career, I've seen many more errors with Metric units (decimal point errors, imagine that!) than I have with the English system.
HELP STAMP OUT THE METRIC SYSTEM!
P.S.: Of course, what we really need to adopt is a correct measurement system based on Dublins, that perfect unit of length between a yard and a meter, where the acceleration of gravity here on earth would be 10 Dublins/s^2. Physics and engineering students worldwide would celebrate my birthday with fireworks and parties.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
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...
The full specifications are:
.5 a small child per coffee-table
Storage: 195.7 decabytes per 3.3 twips
Rotational velocity: 948 furlongs per fortnight
Weight:
Operating temperature: As warm as a large cow.
Operating noise range: Approx that of a dyslexic peg-legged mime performing an impromptu street rendition of Macbeth using a small matchbox containing 12 red ants as his only prop.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.