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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!
[tinfoilhat]I am sticking to my 5.25" floppy, it's the only reliable way to backup data.[/tinfoilhat]
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...
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
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
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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;
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
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, 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.
Finding women is easy! Talking to them is the tricky part.
What next...vacuum tubes?
You bet! Except they'll be nanovacuum tubes -- The problem, of course, is changing them when they burn out...
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