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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.
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?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3245822.stm (see the 2 in the url denotes international audience , UK traffic is a 1)
- 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
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.
...analogous to CD-R (recordable) as opposed to CD-RW (rewritable). How will common file systems and OS designs have to change to accommodate WORM media? Or is this not intended to displace hard disk drives?
Interesting analogy considering the state of the industry at the moment. Intel is working on a replacement for flash that utilizes chalcogenide - the material used in rewritable disks like CDRW and DVDRW.
The idea is the same as what we have here except, instead of the "blown fuse" technique, the chalcogenide material stores data as a level of resistance (which can be set/reset trillions of times). Intel believes that this is a successor to flash, which is expected to hit the scalable wall at 45nm (2007-8ish). Because the chalcogenide material can be "programmed" to hundreds of unique levels of resistance, it is expected that Intel will get as much as 8 bits per cell, which will put density into or above that of conventional hard drives.
So there you have it - DRAM and hard drive replacement in one.
If you are looking for an investment that leverages this technology, consider Energy Conversion Devices out of Rochester, Michigan. The CEO is Stanford Ovshinsky of "Ovshinsky Effect" fame. They invented this technology back in the 60s and Gordon Moore even wrote a paper on it in 1970, I believe. But material technology is only just now beginning to develop to the point that this can become feasible.
Disclaimer - I am an investor in this company and I consider it EXTREMELY high-risk. The company is currently teetering on the edge of solvency.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Polyester data polymer pants, it'll be the '70's all over again!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
Plan 9 in particular uses WORM media for long term storage and as a form of versioning - it uses magnetic rotating disk platters for level-2 caching and volatile RAM for level-1 caching.
:
/n/dump/1995/0315 is the root directory of an image of the file system as it appeared in the early morning of March 15, 1995. It takes a few minutes to queue the blocks, but the process to copy blocks to the WORM, which runs in the background, may take hours.
From http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html
"The file server has three levels of storage. The central server in our installation has about 100 megabytes of memory buffers, 27 gigabytes of magnetic disks, and 350 gigabytes of bulk storage in a write-once-read-many (WORM) jukebox. The disk is a cache for the WORM and the memory is a cache for the disk; each is much faster, and sees about an order of magnitude more traffic, than the level it caches. The addressable data in the file system can be larger than the size of the magnetic disks, because they are only a cache; our main file server has about 40 gigabytes of active storage.
The most unusual feature of the file server comes from its use of a WORM device for stable storage. Every morning at 5 o'clock, a dump of the file system occurs automatically. The file system is frozen and all blocks modified since the last dump are queued to be written to the WORM. Once the blocks are queued, service is restored and the read-only root of the dumped file system appears in a hierarchy of all dumps ever taken, named by its date. For example, the directory
There are two ways the dump file system is used. The first is by the users themselves, who can browse the dump file system directly or attach pieces of it to their name space. For example, to track down a bug, it is straightforward to try the compiler from three months ago or to link a program with yesterday's library. With daily snapshots of all files, it is easy to find when a particular change was made or what changes were made on a particular date. People feel free to make large speculative changes to files in the knowledge that they can be backed out with a single copy command. There is no backup system as such; instead, because the dump is in the file name space, backup problems can be solved with standard tools such as cp, ls, grep, and diff.
The other (very rare) use is complete system backup. In the event of disaster, the active file system can be initialized from any dump by clearing the disk cache and setting the root of the active file system to be a copy of the dumped root. Although easy to do, this is not to be taken lightly: besides losing any change made after the date of the dump, this recovery method results in a very slow system. The cache must be reloaded from WORM, which is much slower than magnetic disks. The file system takes a few days to reload the working set and regain its full performance.
Access permissions of files in the dump are the same as they were when the dump was made. Normal utilities have normal permissions in the dump without any special arrangement. The dump file system is read-only, though, which means that files in the dump cannot be written regardless of their permission bits; in fact, since directories are part of the read-only structure, even the permissions cannot be changed.
Once a file is written to WORM, it cannot be removed, so our users never see ``please clean up your files'' messages and there is no df command. We regard the WORM jukebox as an unlimited resource. The only issue is how long it will take to fill. Our WORM has served a community of about 50 users for five years and has absorbed daily dumps, consuming a total of 65% of the storage in the jukebox. In that time, the manufacturer has improved the technology, doubling the capacity of the individual disks. If we were to upgrade to the new media, we would have more free space than in the original empty jukebox. Technology has created storage faster than we can use it. "
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.
Well, you should not forget that there are many many competing technologies for a flash successor. Thinks to consider when discussing OUM:
-Intel (and ST to a minor factor) are the only companies investing into this, all competitors have different technologies.
-A demonstration of reliable high density operation has still to follow. Handling local temperature differences of several hundrend kelvins within a sold state device poses many problems. Thermal stress will contribute to wear out, characteristics drift etc etc..
-How about process compatibility.. no mention about this, yet
-Intel is also investing in competing technologies
Some companies (for example Infineon) are also investigating sub 45nm flash-alike memory utilizing FinFets.
None of the new technologies for nonvolatile memories come even close to the density of advanced flash concepts like NROM, Mirror Bit flash, multilevel flash.
(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.
-Intel (and ST to a minor factor) are the only companies investing into this, all competitors have different technologies.
Not true - Lockheed Martin is also a developer. I should also note that there are many private developers that won't ever need a license if they ultimately can't create a working/profitable device.
-A demonstration of reliable high density operation has still to follow. Handling local temperature differences of several hundrend kelvins within a sold state device poses many problems. Thermal stress will contribute to wear out, characteristics drift etc etc..
Intel has already demonstrated a cycle life of 10^12 and expects data retention of 10 years at 120dC.
-How about process compatibility.. no mention about this, yet
Google for this. Intel is throwing the weight of their R&D to OUM because it is so process-friendly. They are currently running OUM alongside the Pentium 3.0Ghz line (not commercially viable / internal R&D use only).
A brief here...
Ovonyx non-volatile memory technology offers significantly faster write and erase speeds and higher cycling endurance than conventional Flash memory. It also has the advantage of a simple fabrication process, which allows the design of semiconductor chips with embedded non-volatile memory using only a few additional mask steps.
Interesting comments from the horse's mouth.
-Intel is also investing in competing technologies
Yes - but they are on record (see original EBN link from parent post) stating that OUM shows the most promise. But, as I did state earlier, I see this as extremely speculative. I would not be here if I was not a whore for the technology. I fully expect to do one of two things with my investment:
1) 100 fold return by 2010
2) lose it all
That is what speculation is all about.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
How will common file systems and OS designs have to change to accommodate WORM media?
Plan 9 from Bell Labs already has.