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Anti-static Polymer Stores Data, Too
Tau Zero writes "The BBC reports that a group of scientists (including Stephen Forrest) have discovered a new use for the anti-static plastic film polyethylenedioxythiophene: storing up to a gigabyte per cubic centimeter. The storage technology resembles an old fuse-link PROM; a bit of polymer between two electrodes conducts electricity when new, but a strong pulse turns it into an open circuit. The polymer is already cheap, and read/write speeds are claimed to be good. The researchers predict that this could be made into working devices in a few years (no word on whether this means devices in the laboratory or retail packages)." Update: 11/29 16:34 GMT by CN : Whoops, we already reported this earlier, and I was fooled into thinking it new by the BBC. Given the slump of news due to the holiday weekend, it's still worth mulling over, though.
See http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/12/214622 7 for a link with considerably more detail.
Does this mean everybody will just carry around little cubes of anti-static material that pop into their PC?
Would be a welcome change over floppies..
I already see a use for this as a portable mp3 player. But this stuff rarely pans out as people claim, so I'm not holding out any hope.
Any device resulting from their work would be a "write-once, read-many" format ... They team estimates that working devices could be up to 10 times more dense than current hard disks.
strong enough jolt of power it becomes permanently non-conducting
The only way a new form of permanent media can become popular is if it is much cheaper, faster, and more durable than CD-ROMs.
Even then, a gig in a block the size of a sugar cube (plus supporting electronics). Already this takes up more space-per-gig than a DVD. What's the advantage?
I doubt it...I like my small transport media to be rewriteable, and this stuff isn't : / Even thought they're dirt cheap, I feel a pang of guilt every time I write one little file to a CD-R to give to pass on to a friend, and I think that guilt would only increase if I were burning something as awesome as a mini datacube. But, they could be a good, cheap, voluminous media for digital cameras and the like...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3245822.stm (see the 2 in the url denotes international audience , UK traffic is a 1)
this abbreviation is giving me second thoughts, perhaps it should not be used to identify this material.
Although this entire idea sounds promissing, it is not the first time that I hear about storing gigabytes of data in a sugar-cube sized material for read only applications. Somehow they just do not materialize.
You can't handle the truth.
- Increased storage capacity lead to a decrease of data quality which renders aquired data in the long term basically useless. You might have 100s of pentabytes of data, you'll never have the time and processing power to analyse it or make any sensible use of it.
- Increased storage capacity lead automatically to the storage of more data. The storage limits are just reached much faster and you'll be basically again stuck at the storage limits. But this time point 1. kicks in and you have more storage units but much less use for it.
- The increased data storage increases the propability of the violation of personal and cooperate privacy by goverment or other 3rd parties. Combined with the automatic effect of point 2. this can lead to an Orwellian society if high storage adaption if faster than the adaption of society - even if the political leaders don't aim for it initially.
- Increased data storage makes backup and other storage presevering operation more expensive. This results in lower preserving operations per important data units which results in high loss propabilities. I think I don't have to point out the further consequences.
At the whole the whole dedication to increasing data storage is in fact a bad thing. Instead we should concentrate our economical forces the enhance data quality which is a more important and harder task. Note further that data storage and data care is basically a low-skilled and personal intensive operation. Such operations can be easily outsourced by high capacity communications channels like the internet to developing countries like India, China or Poland. These techniques have no future in high wage countries like US, Japan or Europe. So a dedication the high-skilled data quality enhanching would make much more sense from an economical point of view.Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Rewritable storage is only needed if storage space is expensive. If WORM media were spacious enough and cheap enough, it could be used for almost all secondary storage applications except swap space and some rewrite-intensive applications (like video editting). As a side benefit, one would have the ultimate in file archiving -- every version of the file would be retained in WORM media. Many forms of malware would be easily undone by rolling back software, files, etc.
Why spend extra money for a rewritable storage system if WORM is cheap enough?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I never expected to see a development like this; as a sci-fi aficionado, it's quite interesting to see some of the other methods that have been highlighted both fictionally and in the news. ;-)
The first thought that entered my mind was that this could be used, if sufficiently refined, in a similar manner to a USB "keyring drive" - you just carry all your data with you and snap it into a workstation wherever you go. This could well be the same deal... or it could be the basis for those goofy wood-block circuit elements they used in the original Star Trek
Or you could make smart cards "smarter"... more info, possibly with a tamperproof MD5 someplace so the information carried on the card can't be faked.
I do realise that data and Information Technology is becoming an increasing part of our lives, and there's a great drive towards more power and more storage - but what about reducing bloat, increasing security, and making data and software (whether for work, entertainment, whatever) of better quality? It's almost like something out of Philip K. Dick - eventually, we'll drown in our own digital kipple (not to mention landfills consisting wholly of old PC components and AOL CDs)
Anyone got any idea how this method of storage stacks up against (real and theoretical) things like magnetic, optical, quantum, holographic and crystalline?
"It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." -- Zork
You could have a "sugar-cube" like holder for the device, and just pop a new one in when it has filled up.
In other words, like the memory cube they pulled out of the robot's head in that A.I. movie. But what if your OS is on one cube, the cube is nearly full, and somebody announces a security hole in your web browser? Will the downloaded updates need to spill onto a second cube? If so, will all computers need a whole bunch of cube drives?
As well as optical storage (which we already use with spinning discs CD/DVD) optical memory will be able to integrate into optical processors, such as the optical DSP that was recently announced in Israel.
Would this plastic storage would be sensitive to magnetic damage like a traditional hard disk as well.
Finally, I read that the Earths' magnetic field can 'flip' every 100,000 years and we're about due for another flip soon. This would cause tremendous damage to all magnetically stored data, as well as plenty of electrical equipment, as it is not a quick clean flip, but equivalent to a massive electromagnetic storm right under our feet - possibly lasting years according to archeological evidence.
"Given the slump of news due to the holiday weekend, it's still worth mulling over, though."
Read as:
You're reading Slashdot, you have no life. Here, read this, again.
I bet the funny thing about using anti-static polymer for data storage, is that it's sensitive to static. One little zap and a gigabyte of data is gone.
...
wish it where da other way around a weak current makes it open curcuit. a strong one makes it a mega resistor ... alas dreams ...
Being fooled into thinking a story is new by the BBC is like being fooled into thinking a product is secure and efficient by Microsoft. Or, thinking a story is accurate, by CNN.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Dude! You forgot about the goats! How can you talk about sex and forget the goats?!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent -- Salvor Hardin
I'm guessing this memory goo, e-paper and full bandwidth video phones are in the trunk of the flying car. Kill 10 birds with one stone!
Polyester data polymer pants, it'll be the '70's all over again!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
1GB/1cc doesn't sound too impressive. Look up 'tesa-rom' on Google, 1TB on a roll of 'magic tape', a common transparent adhesive. Maybe 10cc one.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Don't be so hasty with putting this memory in your computres and MP3 players. The way from idea to stores is quite long and a lot of ideas don't go beyond the project stage.
There still are Polymer Memory, Ovionics Unified Memory (OUM), Magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) and ferro-electric RAM (FeRAM) There is a lot of intresting memory-related projecs in progress, only time will show which of them are actually useful and will be installed in our future computers.
Hold an iPod in your hand: 40gb in the palm of your hand!
Hold a DVD in your hand: 9gb in the palm of your hand!
Hold a Karma Rio in your hand: 20gb in the palm of your hand!
These things do happen!
GPL Deconstructed
What holiday?
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Ah, but you can't get 15GB of storage space today.
Seriously, look for it. Hard to get anything under 40GB, really. If the availability of increased storage capacity (and increased chance of failure) means you can't find something smaller and more reliable, is that a good thing?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
What's wrong with Flash Drives? I swear that every college student in the Twin Cities has bought one of those things from my retail store.
More than enough BS
Sounds theoretical.
Theoretically, a 1-cm silicon memory chip stores way more than a GB per cc.
But good luck stacking them at that density with any hope of reliability.
the link is already in the post.
I'll just get a couple of 80GB drives and RAID them. So, yes, it is a good thing, if the prices go down, and they did go down. (Heck, I paid ~USD1400 for that Pentium 100MHz, back then)
For the few that only need 15GB and reliability, yes, it is a bad thing. But for the majority of us, cheaper/bigger drives are better.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent -- Salvor Hardin
Well, for Write-once, read-many, I guess that's right. An ungodly huge drive that is not rewritable would make sense for most activities (turning all your CDs into MP3s, for example), and you'll have a hard time replacing the neccessity of read/write drives. I actually would like WORM to be several leaps ahead of R/W as far as density goes. My box of 275+ backup CDs can attest to my annoyance..
So, this technology won't actually eliminate smaller R/W drives..
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
(And IMHO, anyone who moderated the parent as "interesting" is even more ignorant than the poster. There are at least three of them with mod points in just one day, and that scares me.)
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
This also works with a piece of turkey meat. Turkey Write Once Read Many memory: Turkey WORM.
My box of 275+ backup CDs can attest to my annoyance..
For backups, it's not really Write-once, read-many, it's Write-once, read-seldom. The media does need to be re-readable, but the majority will never be accessed again.
Ideally, for backup, you want something like 10 times the storage for 10 percent of the cost.
There should be some way to implement a file system using a large WORM drive and a smaller R/W drive so that the WORM drive stores the unchanging stuff and the R/W drive stores the changing stuff. I imagine that running out of space would get pretty ugly though.
Krapangor is a TROLL! Read it before you mod it informative, you idiots!
an old fuse-link PROM
Where do we get this so called fuse-link pr0n?
Nobody has ever mass produced a memory technology that wasn't relatively flat in shape. If a cubic centimeter can hold a gigabyte or 2^33 bits, a single layer can probably hold 2^(33*2/3) bits or 256 kb, not taking into account the shape of the cells. If they somehow manage to stack say, 32 layers of this, they'll get 8mb, which is much more realistic and still pretty good for a square centimeter of non-volatile memory.
Yes, but you can write umpteen times on a hard drive, which would mean WORM media would have to be at least a hundred times cheaper than WMRM media for it to be "cheap enough".
You can write upteen times to a harddrive, but most people don't. Most of the files on my harddrive have only been written once. Files such as system files (except preferences), application executables, digital camera images, copies of old documents, music files tend to be written once. Moreover, most of the files that have been written multiple times (e.g. working documents, images that I am editing) get written a few times for a few days and then sit unwritten for years. I'd bet that a petabyte WORM drive with a little as 10 gigabytes of hard drive as cache (cached files would be copied to WORM once the file is unchanging for a 1 week) would work extremely well and have far less than 2 copies per megabyte on the WORM side.
Thus, the break-even cost ratio point for WORM-based operations might be only a factor of two or three. WORM media does not need to be hundred of times cheaper.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
They can stack em relatively well, 8 layer devices have been shown using anti-fuse cells instead of thin film memory and you can always use MCMs to stack em further. The problem is that you can only cut cost so much with layering.
... but as long as the cost of litography isnt driven down dramatically thin film memory cant compete with part mechanical storage devices in bits per buck.
Traditional litography simply is bloody expensive, adding more layers only makes it a little cheaper
Your default posting score of 0 appears to have been earned justly.
The same laws of physics which create the earth's magnetic field (magnetic induction) prevent it from changing rapidly. If you'd bothered to do even the most trivial Google search on the topic (I used ``earth "magnetic field reversal" ' '), you would have found this NASA page. A quote from one of its pointers: Needless to say, this rate of field change is no threat whatsoever to magnetic media of any kind. A 7200 RPM hard disc can already see the Earth's 0.7 gauss field reverse itself 120 times per second (assuming it is oriented correctly), and this poses no difficulties whatsoever for storage. The idea that a change requiring 4000 years would be a problem for your HD is simply preposterous. The first search result also debunks any notion of sudden or tragic results. I'm not afraid of them, or you. I fear for the future of this society, because people like you and they actually think you understand these things well enough to claim an opinion on the matter. As even the most trivial of attempts to educate yourself would have given you (or the moderators) authoritative information to the contrary, and as Slashdot users are selected from probably the top 10% of the population, this should worry everyone.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Try flipping a floppy disk (or other piece of magnetic medium) in your hands a few times, with the axis of rotation oriented east-west. This should simulate the earth's magnetic field itself doing the flip-flop. (Tell me if I am wrong in assumming this!).
Question:
Is the floppy harmed by the flipping?
This ends today's thought experiment.
Video surveillance algorithms now have an extra order of magnitude to deal with/rely on/utilize-for-efficiency.
/tmp/public_p2p/ folder.
"Internet1" (cache of the 'net as it stands today) could be stored in everyones
Internet2, of course, requires a whole lotta more garbage bags...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
was right ;-)
I remeber all my RPG cyberpunk sessions where we used those cute little crystal (or plastic?) pyramids to store data.
Once we even had to retreive one from some evil gang of thugs that ruled half of Los Angeles.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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This article was on Popular Science a week ago wasnt it?
I couldn't think of a sig.
Scotch Tape Storage
Unfortunately the link in the article is stale.