Slashdot Mirror
Microwires Can Replace The DVD-ROM
neutron_p writes "A former Soviet Union military development finds its use in modern technology and still remains fascinating." The development comes in the form of a flexible microwire, 10 micrometers thick and 10cm long, with a metal body and a glass coating, which the linked article says "can store 10 Gigabytes of information. It is possible thanks to their magnetic properties. Anyway, it's not that easy. Researchers say that the greatest difficulty will be with the reading of information."
Star Trek geek in me coming out... :)
3 or 5 times thinner than a human hair, these fine threads were invented in the old Soviet Union for military purposes... Data wig? What?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
the greatest difficulty will be with the reading of information
Is the long anticipated write-only memory here at last? Huzzah!
Researchers say that the greatest difficulty will be with the reading of information.
Excellent! Now my Perl scripts will truly become Write Once Read Never!!
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
[tinfoilhat]I am sticking to my 5.25" floppy, it's the only reliable way to backup data.[/tinfoilhat]
Microwires Can Replace The DVD-ROM...Researchers say that the greatest difficulty will be with the reading of information.
i can write lots of data but then it's lost??
where do i sign up for this great *new* technology??
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
Researchers say that the greatest difficulty will be with the reading of information.
How the hell can they tell it's there if they can't even read it?
I'm already going batty trying to not lose these fucking tiny cartriges for the Nintendo DS. Now I'm going to have to keep track of a 10cm molecular-width wire and find myself losing them like pencils as they fall out of my pocket.
I have seen the future and it is inconvenient
thinks that CDs use magnetism to report on new tech?
"The microwires become diminutive substitutes for the CD-ROM, given that information can be stored magnetically on them, as with CDs."
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Backup is easy! The restore is the tricky part.
From the article:
The researchers calculate that a 10 cm long microwire can carry out 10 million divisions or cells and in each one of these a byte can be stored. In order to store the byte, each one of these cells is magnetised in one orientation or the other.
Don't they mean a "bit"? How can you store a whole byte with just two magnetic orientations?
Measure A/B, convert the resulting fraction into a hexadecimal string, and there's your data.
Only problem is that your microscope has to be really good.
-T
The researchers calculate that a 10 cm long microwire can carry out 10 million divisions or cells and in each one of these a byte can be stored. In order to store the byte, each one of these cells is magnetised in one orientation or the other.
Assuming they didn't mean "bits" when they said "bytes", that only sounds like 10 megabytes to me... Not gigabytes. If they meant bits instead of bytes, which seems likely given the description, that's only 1.25 megabytes in 10 cm...
How the hell can they tell it's there if they can't even read it?
If 10GB of MP3s are written on a wire, and there is no reader to play it. Does it make a sound?
You can't take the sky from me...
In soviet russia, thousands predicted your statement.
I just save everything to /dev/null and I never have a problem with storage space.
There's already a name for this. It's called tape.
(Tape storage started with metal-wire recorders, but esentially they're the same idea, only it's harder to strangle someone with magtape.)
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
This technology dates back a ways to an 1878 invention, and devices such as the Webster wire recorder of the 1940s and these models from WWII.
Its amazing how often new tech is really old tech.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The microwires become diminutive substitutes for the CD-ROM, given that information can be stored magnetically on them, as with CDs.
... And "10 million" is not a Giga ... So we are talking about 1.25 MegaBytes in 10 cm long. Hmmm ....
Since when information is stored magnetically on CDs ????
10 Gigabytes in 10 cm long
(...)
The researchers calculate that a 10 cm long microwire can carry out 10 million divisions or cells and in each one of these a byte can be stored. In order to store the byte, each one of these cells is magnetised in one orientation or the other.
Seems more like a bit on each cell, not bytes
What the hell is this article ???
the divisions are carried out internally by means of a process of anisotrophy.
Anisotrophy? What kind of "trophy" is that? However, there is something known as anisotropy.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Hyuk!! I got me a storage dee-vice that exists on every Unix system in the world and it's got In-Fi-Night capacity!!! It's called /dev/nul and that sucker seems to have more storage in it than the ocean has water! Of course, like these microwires, I need to figure out how to recover the data from it too.
[No Offense meant to southerners unless you voted for Bush]
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
the microwires become diminutive substitutes for the CD-ROM, given that information can be stored magnetically on them, as with CDs.
Since when did CD's start storing data magnetically? I thought it was optically? Where can I buy these new-fangled magnetic CD's?!
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
It is possible thanks to their magnetic properties. Anyway, it's not that easy. Researchers say that the greatest difficulty will be with the reading of information.
L. Ron Hubbard?
What, do they also use renegades?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
From the article: The researchers calculate that a 10 cm long microwire can carry out 10 million divisions or cells and in each one of these a byte can be stored. In order to store the byte, each one of these cells is magnetised in one orientation or the other.
When they say "byte" here, they seem to mean "bit". (for the script kiddies, there are 8 bits to the byte) Also, they're referring to "10 million divisions" not "10 billion divisions".
So it wouldn't be 10 gigabytes, it would be more like 1.2 megabytes, or roughly 122k/cm. To store 10 gigabytes, it would have to be over 838m long, or over 2750 feet.
Frankly, I'm not horribly impressed.
Not to mention, this is just in theory. It hasn't actually been done yet.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
I prefer to store all my information by sending it into a black hole. As with the microwires, reading it tends to be a bit difficult.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
I'll cancel my appointment with the Hair Club for Men till this is perfected. Just think how much data my flowing locks will store.
[tinfoilhat]I am sticking to my 5.25" floppy, it's the only reliable way to backup data.[/tinfoilhat]
Fool. Using this untested, so called 'floppy disk' will only lead to data loss. The only tested, and reliable storage meidum is the punch card. Don't trust these new fangled gadgets until they have been proven to be more than some mad scientist's pipe dream.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Number which cannot be expressed as a mean of a division of two integer. For example PI, Square Root 2, Exp (1) etc... Those numbe do exists. but they do Not belong to the rational ensemble.
For kicker : |N Which read , natural integer ensemble N is included in positive and negative integer ensemble Z , which is included in rational ensemble Q, which is included in real ensemble R which is included into complex ensemble C at which point a therom (completness theorem?) says there is no ensemble in which C is included and is "greater".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
That you have a 10 cm wire that works like a floppy disk, and has the same capacity, except you can't read from it. You compare the magnetic switch technique to CDs, which are optical, and state that this will replace the DVD, even though the highly inaccurate 10 gig capacity is only marginally better than Dual layer DVDs, and we have HD-DVD and Bluray coming out shortly (i.e. before they figure out how to read the data), which will smoke DVDs anyway. WHY IS THIS POSTED ON SLASHDOT!?
This innovation should have been covered in Wired .
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Go back in time. Wire predated tape, actually. The original dictation machines were wire recorders. Wire recorders are still used for flight data and cockpit voice recorders in commercial aircraft (though they are being slowly phased out and replaced, I believe, with flash memory).
Another novel moment in the history of wire recorders: one of the first VTRs (used at the BBC) was a linear "tape" recorder. Bandwidth being proportional to the speed of the media across the head, they moved the "tape" at amazingly high speed. The only "tape" that would stand up to the stress was actually made of steel - making it more like flat wire than what we think of as tape. Couple the weight of the tape with the amount of it you needed and you wound up with huge 10 foot diameter spools of the stuff. The machine was also quite dangerous - if the tape broke, it would hurl fragments of steel that bore a not-so-passing resembelence to razor blades.
Fortunately, helical scanning was invented, which allows the heads to fly across the tape while the tape itself moves relatively slowly. But now we're drifting off topic.
I don't know whether to believe this or not. It seems too reminiscent of an old Outer Limits episode called "Demon with a Glass Hand," in which the entire human race has been converted to electrical impulses and stored on a small piece of wire.
Also the article seems to confuse bits and bytes, and says "researchers calculate that a 10 cm long microwire can carry out 10 million divisions or cells" -- the wire is carrying out divisions? Either this is poorly written or a poorly conceived hoax.
I, for one, have been waiting for the Write-Once, Read Never drives.
Let's face it: half the stuff on your drive you're never going to use again anyway. Might as well save it on a data hair so it will not be there when you don't need it.
And these things will be easy to design to follow moore's law. Every 18 months, just put a new label on the package.
Following on the heels of the breakthrough of microwires, researchers have announced success in storing data on individual particles. This zero dimensional technology involves selectively magnetizing microscoping grains. So far, researchers admit that there are some difficulties in reading back information. Said a spokesman for the group, "We considered affixing them to a sheet or disc of some kind, but then we would lose all of the benefits of non-dimensionality." When asked what those benefits were the interview was forcibly ended after said spokesman began throwing bar magnets at the press.
Finding women is easy! Talking to them is the tricky part.
DVD-WOM
ha!
Please stop stalking me, bro.
What next...vacuum tubes?
You bet! Except they'll be nanovacuum tubes -- The problem, of course, is changing them when they burn out...
Required reading for internet skeptics
Or to give it its acronym, the long-awaited "Write Many, Read Never" drive is here..
You know, kinda like those 5 cent DVD-Rs you get down the market..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
This form of memory isn't much different from this 40+ year old tech, is it?
I know there have been a ton of posts saying how the wire only holds 10 million bits and that's only 10 megs, but if you go back and rtfa again they have updated it, it now reads:
"The researchers calculate that a 10 cm long microwire can carry out 10 million [editor's note: Elhuyar Fundazioa made a mistake here, should be billion] divisions or cells and in each one of these a byte can be stored. In order to store the byte, each one of these cells is magnetised in one orientation or the other."
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
If 1Gb = 1e9Gb, 10Gb would be 1e10Gb
Now, for the sake of simplicity, 10cm = 0.1m
0.1m / 1e10Gb = 1e-11 b/m, or 1b = 1e-11 meters.
That puts 1 bit at = 0.000 000 000 01 meters, does it not?
1nm would be = 0.000 000 001
1pm would be = 0.000 000 000 001
Each bit would need to be no more than 10pm (.01nm) for this level of data density. Perhaps my reality has been distorted by too much caffeen. Corrections are welcome.
So how many LoC's per VW would this be?
Excellent. I've always wanted to garotte someone with the full text of Gone With The Wind. My dream finally comes true!
The difficulty is reading it.
This article is full of crap. An angstrom is 10^-10 metres, and corresponds to the diameter of a hydrogen atom. In order to linearly store 10 gigabits (let's assume that the author intended to use "bits" rather than "bytes") in a distance of 0.1 metres, each bit would have to be 10^-11 metres long, which corresponds to a length of 0.1 angstroms. If the author mistook "giga" for "mega", and intended that the wire could store 10 megabits, then that would mean that each magnetic cell would be 10^-8 metres long - 100 angstroms or 10 nanometres. Storing a magnetic bit in such a short distance would be an impressive feat.