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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.
Sorry, try this link.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3245822.stm (see the 2 in the url denotes international audience , UK traffic is a 1)
Bob wrote:
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?
Well.. For one thing what would you say about the fact that this technology doesn't use any moving parts? If you just plop some electrodes on it and can read the thing, then you're rid of ridiculous high spinning speeds, laser readers that need to move back and forth at insane speeds, etc.
Mad.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
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
...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.
I don't believe more data storage may or may not be a bad thing. Although you write that "in fact" it's bad, actually this is your opinion, not an established fact, and certainly not a point of consensus among people who are intimately familiar with the common points you raise.
More storage capacity can create some problems, and the ones you describe are among them. It also solves some problems, among which are problems that have held back basic scientific and medical research, as well as other fields that some people consider useful.
Just to address a few points:
Increased storage capacity can lead to a decrease in average data quality, not the total amount of quality data. So this only renders data useless if you have no way of finding just the data you want, or if you feel obligated to use all of it. In the rare cases that meet these criteria, having smaller storage doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the problem logically impossible to solve rather than logistically (because the data are gone, not just hard to find).
I find the argument that data will continue to grow fast enough to fill available storage unconvincing. The amount of storage I have now is much more than I had 20 years ago. Just like 20 years ago, I could probably use more disk space, so you're right in that sense. But I'm able to do many more things with that disk space now, like storing music, video, and data for my research. It's not that the same things I was doing before are now taking up more space. It's that the bigger disks I have now have made it possible to store much more of the data I would like to keep. Sure, digital pictures and movies keep sucking up more space. But that's a huge benefit of bigger storage. Right now I'm throwing away a lot of data I'd rather keep, in part because of storage (and in part because my current cameras have sensors that aren't up to it). I really do want these data, and bigger storage is critical to making it possible for me to keep them. The amount of storage I have could easily grow by two or three orders of magnitude without making it the least bit more difficult for me to index my data.
Lastly, I doubt that data storage is the limiting factor in shepherding us towards an Orwellian future. A few gigabytes of storage for everyone in this country seems like a good start. Mining that data will be difficult. Yet I doubt the mining difficulties are seen by the relevant people as a reason why more storage would be bad.
In short, I agree that dealing with large amounts of data can be difficult in some cases. I don't agree that it's bad for society.
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. "