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Nickel Sensors Could Raise Hard Disk Capacity
Makarand writes "Tiny filaments of nickel, thinner than a wavelength of visible light, acting as magnetic
sensors may expand the storage capacity of hard disks many times. Although, technologies
exist to increase hard disk capacity, reading data bits reliably from such disks has proven
difficult because as data bits become smaller their magnetic fields are weaker and difficult
to pick up. Nickel filaments are capable of picking up of these weak magnetic fields
using a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance" which is not completely understood.
As the sensors are only a few atoms wide the electrons travel along a straight line
in the conductor greatly enhancing the binary signal picked up from the data bits.
These sensors could also be used to detect biomolecules in low concentrations."
Tiny filaments of nickel, thinner than a wavelength of visible light,
:)
Is it just me or are we getting too clever?
Soon we'll be storing gigabytes on a single atom...
Get your own free personal location tracker
That depends on how many spins an atom can have at once:) Welcome to the world of quatum mechanics.
To store critical (or any data of some value ie: not junk) data on technology that is so vunurable to external forces if the technology is so small/fragile ?
wouldnt it be better to concentrate on more reliable rather than greater storage ?
Tiny filaments of nickel, thinner than a wavelength of visible light
Then how do we know they're there?
I dunno... First we had giant magnetoresistance, then colossal magnetoresistance... Ballistic just doesn't seem to fit. We should call it gargantuan magnetoresistance, or Herculean... I know! Let's call it "humongous magnetoresistance"!
...as I had the first HDD failure warning this evening on my "auto destruct after 12 months" IBM 60GXP. I wouldn't mind so much if it had been hammered, but it's in a PC that gets used about twice a month. Does 99.9% of the population care less about the availability of 200GB hard drives? Surely the priority should be data security, then speed (it's the biggest bottleneck in your PC), then capacity?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Where and when will I - a normal consumer - be able to notice all those fantastic advances, like pixie dust, nickel filaments etc.? Sure, I notice a nice increase in storage capacity, a decrease in cost (and a warranty decrease;) - but nowhere I can see fantastic, large changes!
If I had a nickel for every time...
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
It's always important when matters aren't entirely understood to choose carefully, namely the one in possession of the puffy little shoes.
Phhh. I knew that and I'm not even American...
Cheers,
Ian
"If you can't move on with your life the terrorists have won!"
get a grip. people die every day
How much slower will hard drives be? Or will they get faster? ...it just sounds slower to me, :)
Shouldn't more reasearch be made into solid state memory? I'm not a big fan of hard drive noises and grinding... but hey any research is good research
Now the term "going ballistic" has a whole new meaning!
This sounds cool though, sounds like Moore's law will keep moving along...
Though the data storage application could certainly serve to fund the development and popularisation of this technology, it seems possible that in the long term the quoted "secondary" application may actually be the primary one. If the device can be tuned to detect virtually anything, it has obvious applications in industrial processes, bomb detection, and so on. This is incremental to existing efforts in these areas.
However, if it can be further trained to distinguish, it essentially amounts to an electronic "sense of smell". This is very exciting and has innumerable applications, especially in combination with other sensor devices and realtime feedback mechanisms involving both software and hardware.
A hypothetical consumer application might be to control the temperature that a bread product is grilled at, bringing it to a perfect (and user-selectable) stated of brownness, while turning down the heat in individual spots at the slightest hint of burning. Wonderful development
Could I interest anyone in some toast?
The article says nothing about writing data at such high densities. Something about this invention reminds me of the chip in the Terminator's head....
-- thinkyhead software and media
You probably haven't noticed because not only are capacities going up, costs are going down as well. That 200 gig hard drive is selling for less money than 200 meg drives were when they first came out. The capacities are becoming so enormous that they're threatening to become meaningless; most computer users wouldn't know the difference between a 60 gig drive and a 20. (They might not even know where to look to find out which they have, for that matter.) As a result, companies are spending as much of their resources on dropping prices as they are boosting size.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Last time a drive failed on me, I made it go ballistic too, and it offered little resistance (however the concrete offered considerable resistance). Is this a similar thing?
It works, but they don't know how. Looks like a recipe to future problems.
If this works, in a production environment when it exposed to certain radiation, radio signals, heat/cold, etc it not, will be dangerous to rely in that kind of things.
"It's Magic!" is ok for childrens, but not if you want do to something serious.
Spontaneous flipping still poses an upper limit to magnetic data storage capacity. Basically, if you cram lots of bits too close together, they will start flipping each other.
r ch.nsf/pages/frontier399.html
see: http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresea
under storing information for info on pushing this limit
Seems more informative than anything else...
~D:
The they figure out - Geez, you use a handfull of nickle and you can make enough nanosensors to supply the geek industry for a year...
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
"At the very least a $1000 tax should be laid on all hard disk drives over 2GB." Are you insane? 2GB?!?
a 2^9C magnetic field for a single bit. The data would last FOREVER and have hardly any degredation! Now we'll just need a few warehouses to store it, anyone want to invest?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
What chafes my drawers is that fact that we're looking to increase capacity and not reliability. Isn't the average life span of a hard drive only about 5-7 years? What ever happend to solid state storage??
fuck insightful, is this even relevant to anything that i have ever seen on /.? never mind relevant to this story, relevant to anything...
that get's a little nervous about the idea that my data is accessed through a sensor 'only a few atoms wide'?
"As the sensors are only a few atoms wide" I wonder if they would dislodge/misalign if you dropped the hard drive by accident, or even moved it to fast.
More than seven people have suffered horrible deaths this week. As a non-American, I won't be attatching any particular significance to such a small number of deaths.
If you cared about people other than astronauts, then you would find that tragedy occurred so often that we would have to mourn constantly and we wouldn't have any time to avert future tragedies.
Most people do not need large 200GB drives for their home computers but they are often used in servers. The advancement of servers is helping to get a more stable web community and since the internet is currently the main driving force behind computers this is quite important.
I agree. I think that the hard drive manufacturers need to stop focusing on how big they can make drives, and to start focusing on ways to make drives more reliable. A 200 GB drive is useless if it dies after six months.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
"It's Magic!" is ok for childrens, but not if you want do to something serious.
I hereby declare this technology sufficiently advanced!
Tiny whiskers make huge memory storage
From the Science & Technology Desk
Published 1/31/2003 4:07 PM
View printer-friendly version
BUFFALO, N.Y., Jan. 31 (UPI) -- New, tiny magnetic sensors could help break a technical barrier to ushering in the next generation of computer disk storage capacity, researchers reported Friday.
The sensors, filaments of nickel thinner than a wavelength of visible light, are capable of detecting extremely weak magnetic fields.
Although it is already possible to increase hard drive storage capacity many times, the process has lagged because technology has not existed to read the data signals, researcher Harsh Chopra, a materials scientist at the State University of New York in Buffalo, told United Press International.
"Now we can," he said.
The problem with expanding storage disk capacity is that as data bits become exceedingly small, their magnetic fields become correspondingly weaker and harder to read, Chopra explained. In order to read data signals reliably, the signals must produce a large enough change in the electrical resistance of the computer's magnetic sensors. The signals also must produce those changes at room temperature.
In findings to be published in next July's issue of the journal Physical Review B, Chopra and physicist Susan Hua described sensors they have developed that are both small and sensitive to improve the density of hard drives.
The sensors are actually microscopic whiskers of nickel only a few atoms wide. Each of the filaments can read infinitesimal magnetic fields and at room temperature can detect a 100,000 percent change in voltage.
The sensors result in "much clearer signals," Chopra said.
For comparison, he explained, imagine normal magnetic sensors can read a signal that begins with a strength of 1 and swings between an "off" reading at 0.8 and "on" at 1.2. The new sensors can read a range that swings between minus 1000 and plus 1000. That degree of sensitivity means terabits of data -- or trillions of bits -- could be crammed into a square inch of disk space. About 160 terabits comprise the entire contents of the Library of Congress.
Chopra said the extreme sensitivity of the new sensors is due to a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance," or BMR.
"Normally, when electrons travel in a wire, they go in a zigzag pattern, scattered by impurities or temperature-dependent effects," he explained. "Here the conductor has become so small, the electrons travel in straight paths."
Chopra said the ballistic electrons lead to clearer binary signals -- at least in part. However, "we don't fully understand how the signal is enhanced to such very large degrees," he said. "The existing theories don't yet explain it. There are some things here no one quite understands. That means there's a lot of science to be discovered yet."
Meanwhile, Chopra and Hua are experimenting with sensors made of other substances, such as magnetite and chromium oxide. They are using a manufacturing technique developed originally by researcher Nongjian Tao, of Arizona State University in Tempe. With it, they said, they can reproduce the sensors reliably and simply. Because the sensors remain sensitive at room temperature, they should attract industry attention quickly.
"The normal cycle for (such technologies) from discovery to implementation is about six to eight years," Chopra said.
The research is "very exciting," said K.L. Murty, director of the National Science Foundation's metals research program. "It could have a big impact on magnetic storage -- hard disks -- to put in more memory. It might also have a lot of biomedical applications," he said.
Chopra said the sensors also could be used to detect biomolecules, even in low concentrations. Each organic molecule could have its own fingerprint in terms of affecting whiskers' voltage.
"It might only be two to three years (until we have) a working device in biomedical applications," he said.
--
(Reported by Charles Choi, UPI Science News, in New York)
Why do we continue to invest in research to make bigger and faster storage devices that have moving parts, which gives you speed limitations, noise and reliability problems? I won't be happy until I have a storage device that is silent, as reliable and as fast as DIMMs or L2 cache.
I've also heard of IBM working on Holographic storage, Crystal Storage, and Molecular Storage.... It just seems IBM's R&D groups are more interested in winning patents than actually pumping out viable products-- they aren't exactly known for their innovations in the modern computer age, and are probably more interested in trying to attract US Gov't investments.
Now how long will it be before Steve Jobs comes along, flirts with the CEO of IBM and steals everything only to have Bill Gates come along and steal it off him...
1.Just had a quick look at my Icewind Dale game box: Requires 800 MB free disk space.
2.Even compressed MPEG2 video streams run to almost 1Gb per hour.. How would I make a VCD (to play on the DVD player) out of my home video?
3.Lastly, Windows XP Pro, installed, takes around 1Gb of space (omg.. that's just ridiculous.. someone shoot me for using XP, I _must_ be a terrorist)
To the Laws of Physics.
Is 1 TB on my keychain for under $10, and all i want to know is how soon!??
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Microscopic $/MB is great, but only if you use all those megabytes.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
can you please stop posting in tt?
or did anyone else read the subject as: Nickel Sensors Could Raise Hard Dick Capacity
What does this have to do with "News for Nerds"?
If this was news for electrical engineers, or news for computer scientists fine it would be on topic.
But this slashdot is supposed to be News for Nerds! This means stories about cartoons, government conspiracy theories and why windows suxorz.
Check his posting history; all his posts mention toast. It's still good for a chuckle because it's only his second day posting.
10 toast related posts in the last 24 hours. Anonymous Toaster will have to be pretty creative to keep up that pace without getting on everyone's nerves (hot grits, anyone?) Anyway, that's what keeps things interesting around here:)
Quote:
'a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance" which is not completely understood'
Now, would you trust your data to a phenomenon that is not completely understood? I know I wouldn't
Maybe you're right, in which case they won't buy them. Those that do need them, though, need them badly.
Me, for instance. The last video I did took up 50gb in image data while I was making it, for only 3 minutes of final result. Luckily for me, I only needed to make three minutes worth. If it had been a feature length video... well, I couldn't have done it.
You trust your EXISTENCE to phenomena that are not completely understood.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Ballistic Magnetoresistance?? Souds almost like technobabble; I had a funny thought that you could automatically generate alerts like this every six months using a random "new technology" generator.
June 2003: Scientists have found they can dramatically increase hard drive capacity using *Ferrous Multipliers*!
January 2004: Scientists have found they can dramatically increase hard drive capacity using *Quantum Isolators*!
June 2004: Scientists have found they can dramatically increase hard drive capacity using *Magneto Flux Capacitors*!
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
I am not so concerned about packing more into less at the moment as disk space (ide anyways) is soooo cheap... I would be much more interested in technologies that improve seek times or improve rpms without having to go to a big expensive raid array....
This is just another harsh reminder that I will never see the day that you don't need to buy better hardware anymore. Just when you think they have finaly run out of possibilities for improvement, they go and do this. (I was hoping solid state drives would get cheap within the next few years...kiss that thought goodbye.)
Then again, I want moores law to be fulfilled already, I hate practicaly buying a new computer every 3 years.
I've got a bad 41GB IDE HD with bad sectors, a bad 30GB with bad sectors, a dead 20GB HD and a 60GB IDE HD that is acting irrational. I've also RMA'd three 30GB IDE HDs in the last year.
The ironic thing is I've got five 5.25" full height 9GB SCSIs that are 10+ years old and they work PERFECTLY!
Before increasing capacity, I'd rather see them increase RELIABILITY. I don't care what they specs say about MTBF. I want real world reliability because I am tired of restoring or having to recover failing drives.
You'll notice that this entire thread got bitchslapped. Including all of the posts that were on topic to the parent.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
What we do need is faster access/read times, and an easy way to get that is a solidstate HD. Not a huge amount of storage, maybe about 5-10 gigs worth. Enough to hold the OS and commonly used apps. With RAM prices as low as they are now, where are these things?! I want nano-second access times, not miliseconds! Imagine booting your computer in 3 seconds. Now that would be progress.
I had a conversation a couple of days ago with a coworker about how to improve data density on CD's. One of the ideas I suggested was that instead of packing more bits onto the CD, why not colorize them? A red bit would mean one bit of data, yellow would mean another, and so on. That's just an example. It just seems like they could be putting more data on a disc by changing the way the bit is detected.
It strikes me that there MIGHT be a way to do this in the magnetic world, but I really am not well informed on this topic. Who knows, maybe it's already being done. Enlightening information would be appreciated.
I guess the real point of my post is that adding more density to the drives isn't the only way to increase storage.
While I know I'm rising to a troll, its early Monday morning and I would rather not be at work so I'll bite for something to do.
What about Joe Consumer who buys a new PC with one of these "you-dont-need-more-then-this" 2Gig drives in it.
Being a new comp it will come with an OEM install of winXP so as well as the usual XP bloat it will have the added OEM bloat as well. That should come up to between 1 and 1.2Gig.
Joe Consumers son Johny gets Diablo2 for his birthday/christmas/some-other-gift-giving-event but poor little Johny cant play it as it requires 1.5Gig for a full install. If you want to be able to play both single player and multiplayer.
Don't even think about any other software on the computer. Joe Consumers workplace will go out of business at the cost of having to pay your stupid $1000 tax as without larger drives they don't have the room to have windows and their required office software installed on the machine.
Your theory effectively puts the entire computer software and computer industries "up shit creek" as no-one in their right mind would pay $1000 to be able to install software. It also puts potentially thousands of small-medium businesses who are already struggling with MS stupic licence requirements out of business.
Ultimately if you travel it through to the likely conclusion you will put the entire US through abouther depression as millions are loosing their jobs due to their workplaces going out of business. Con-fucking-gratulations.
Nickel filaments are capable of picking up of these weak magnetic fields using a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance" which is not completely understood.
You want to store your important data using technology you don't understand?
- Why log in, no one cares anyway.
now i just had a hdd crash on me
:( =
40GB of more or less important data vanished
i guess it's my own fault for not backing it up sooner (ironicaly i just bought 50 empty cd-r the same day)
but then as we saw in a previous post even cd's and dvd's arnt the perfect solution if we want to preserve data. my guess is that if we want +100 years of safe storage we would have to use piramids since those have been standing for more than 5k years.
then speed ok i usualy work with 1 realy fast smaler drive and a slower big drive.
some time ago i saw a pci card that had 16GB ram on it that acted like Vdisk. great make that 80 or more and i'm sold purrrrrrrfect for dv
realy do you want a disk spinning in your case at 2000000 rpm @ 10000k just so you can cap a rerun of Dr who at a littel higher bitrate?
anyway cheap temp storage = good
1TB for 200$ gime gime gime gime now!
solid state hey i want it
dont get me wrong there but it wont be secure and it isnt going to be cheap.
=> damn i just droped my memory drive cristal
splattered in to a bilion pieces, now i gotta defrag
..I guess we can't trust gravity either. Time to rewrite textbooks and remove the word gravity, since apparently we can no longer trust it!
1 tequila 2 tequila 3 tequila floor
...ultimately improves the quality and quantity of pr0n.
Carbon nanotubes? Like fullerenes, except they're long cylenders instead of spherical. And they conduct electricity quite well.
Repeal the DMCA!
At Terabytes per square INCH(!), I'll cheerfully put up with a little sluggishness in the new media, thank you very much.
Is it fascism yet?
I don't know what all the fuss about the 60 GXP is about. I've had one running nonstop in my Tivo for 2.5 years with nary a problem. Of course those OTHER 3 I've replaced in my computers kind of ruin the averages ...
Incremental developments in computer technology result in better, faster, cheaper products!
A lead researcher on the team is quoted as saying: "Yes, this means that current developmental trends will continue..." while another: "We really thought we'd reached the end, but, with this, we can continue revolutionizing the world just like we did last year!"
In other news, the sun is due to rise again tomorrow sometime in the morning....
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
After failure number 3, I gave up on sending my GXP back and bought a Seagate. No problems yet...
Why should they? All they need to do is ensure that the drives will last about 2 years, after that, the insatiable demands will have them putting out 500Gb and larger drives, relegating the 200s in the realm of obsolete.
"The avalanche has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote." - Kosh
They are trying to make disks more reliable. Fluid dynamic bearings (FDB) don't wear out as easily as ball bearings. You know...that grinding sound that your disk makes as it spins up and searches for data...yeah that goes away with FDB.
:) Sure beat tapes at least.
I was just checking out a drive by western digital yesterday with FDB...a 160Gig unit. I think it was about a buck a gig, and I would assume much more reliable than my current lowly 30Gig and 20Gig drives...
ahhh...progress...
Hell, I remember being able to work on those REAL hard disk drives. You know, the cartridge ones. Roughly 15 inches in diameter...placed on a unit that stands up to your waist...with a reader arm as big around as my thumb that juts in and out like a pogostick....
Yeah, those were the days. Those drives are still usefull for the sake of basic electronics study though...makes it nice so that the students can see teh inner workings of a disk drive. I think they only stored like 8 Megabytes....maybe less.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
There are funny off-topic posts. There are trollish off-topic posts.
And then there's that . Some moronic pervert thinks it's cool to repost a rape fantasy from alt.sex.stories (without the content warnings). Is there any way the editors can remove it ? It simply should not be read (and shouldn't have been written, either).
Whenever I was at the arcade or Bugsy's Subs, and I lost my last man playing Berzerk, the machine would say "coin detected in pocket!" If we had working quarter sensors back in the 80s, then what's the big deal with nickel sensors now?
Girls have been saying this for years; Size doesn't matter. Anywho, what girls really want is reliability, at least that's what I have been told.
Then again, I'm slacking on that end, among others....
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
Well, if you want 3 seconds boot time, you'll need flash ram, not standard RAM, as they lose the info when you power off. (And no, always-on or UPS is not a solution. The day you trip over the power cord to your machine, it'll be CLEARED). It's not so cheap (at least not on the order of gigabytes), and in fact you do need some. Even a standard popular game like NWN easily eat up 2gb alone.
As for corporate machines, they would probably rather boot their machines from a always-on server which can hold the most common programs in a ramdisk anyway, and simply take the penalty of loading them to ram from disk on the few occasions when the server reboots.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Now that we can have (massively?) increased storage capacity per square inch, shouldn't we start seeing hard disks in the 3.5" form factor that are really 4+ way RAID volumes with a builtin hardware driver to make it behave as a normal disk would? That way you'd get basically what you have now but MUCH more reliably and maybe even a little more capacity. (depending on the massiveness of the change this development can cause in size/data ratio)
Running a PC or a 1U web server on a single hard disk is making for an awfully large failure point if it dies--it's the least replaceable component cause of data loss and they die a lot. Introducing redundancy at this level could help a lot with that issue (and help high density multicomputer serving become more reliable and fault tolerant)
Brian
Yay! now i can backup all the porn on Kazaa....and still have room to spare!
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
8 shades of gray is only 2^3, or three bits. There are 256 possible states in one byte.
And the l33t shall inherit the 34r7h.
I just got backups all over my keyboard...
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
magneto flux capacitors?
"the only place we could get that much storage is... a bolt of lightning!"
Excuse me, but when are we going to start concentrating on speed?
We need the PC to become 10x smaller and 10x faster. And I don't mean processor speed. The thing slowing the PC down most is the HD and we badly need to remove this as the bottleneck.
that happened a while ago... and the nation isn't on the brink of war... George W. Bush is on the bring of sending us into war... Do you know what slashdot is? Its a news site about technology.. you must watch so much cnn that you actually like seing repeats of the same story.. but little do you know people in the real world move on.
"Ballistic Magnetoresistance?" I thought that was the resistance offered by the magnetic platters when I use my .45 to read-protect my drive from the FBI/BSA/MS.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
This sounds like vaporware. It will never make it to the market: "ballistic magnetoresistance" just doesn't capture the imagination. Extraordinary magenetoresistance was a good start, but I'm looking for the next biggest thing in hard drive technology from either "bloody huge magnetoresistance" or "fucking enormous magnetoresistance" technologies.
Geez. They might as well have named it obese magnetoresistance. Ballistic my ass.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
In order for that to work, Joe sixpack is going to have to stop buying computersbased on (GB|MB|MHz)/$, and will have to stop buying hard drives at Fry's based on the biggest frive available under $129...
IBM, Seagate et. all sell to their markets - it'll be a while before priorities change.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
3.Lastly, Windows XP Pro, installed, takes around 1Gb of space (omg.. that's just ridiculous.. someone shoot me for using XP, I _must_ be a terrorist)
Yeah, I remember I was shocked when my 2K install took up ~900MB, about three times as much as my previous win98 install. Still, have you looked at any modern linux distros recently? Easily twice the size.
How do we know those shorter wavelengths are there if we can't see them?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
They would want us to store all our sesitive, cherished, irreplaceable, valuable data on HDs "using a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance" which is not completely understood." :)
That makes me feel so relaxed
So, because it's a "space" tragedy, it deserves attention, but wars, train wrecks, car crashes, suicide bombings, and disease somehow don't?
If you are so upset because 6 people died, how do you function when real "tragedies" happen?
Tesla might've had his own measuerment, and it may very well be better. Different units are a bitch.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.