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'Millipede' Prototype Shown at CeBIT
neutron_p writes "It was a subject of much controversy for last 5 - 7 years, but it's finally got protyped. At CeBIT, IBM for the first time shows the prototype of "Millipede" - nanomechanical data storage device. Using revolutionary nanotechnology, scientists at the IBM Zurich R&D Lab, Switzerland, have made it to the millionths of a millimeter range, achieving data storage densities of more than one terabit per square inch, equivalent to storing the content of 25 DVDs on an area the size of a postage stamp. The principle of operation is comparable with the old punch cards, but now with structural dimensions in the nanometer scale and the ability to erase data and rewrite the medium."
Like when you drop a three foot tall stack of them in the computer lab and have to spend several hours putting them back in order?
(true story)
...the worlds smallest keypunch.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
"The principle of operation is comparable with the old punch cards"
So now we feed these stamp sized cards intot he big machine, and it says "working!, working!, working!" till it spits out another stamp with the answer.
Awesome.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
That is some insane data density, to have more than one terabit per inch. And here those crazy people though nano-tech would bring about "grey goo" -- little did they know the only goo it'd bring about is from the toughts of Slashdotters having a multiple TB's of porn on myeir harddrives.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Unfortunately, I hear that any hardware that uses the "millipede" ends up being a bit "buggy"...
Obviously, on 10 centipedes, rotated weekly.
1. What's the read/write speed?
2. What's the operating temperature requirements?
3. What's the max operating heat output per unit?
4. How many concurrant inputs/outputs can we get into a unit?
5. What's the failure rate/expected operating lifespan?
6. What's the near-term expected commodity cost of these units?
7. Given 1-6, how many units would be needed to make a properly redundant filesystem with at least the reliability and speed of current file storage devices on the market? What would be the expected near-term cost?
Ryan Fenton
For those interested, here are some advantages I see to this technology:
1. Increased storage density. More importantly, this prototype is not near any fundamental limit. Hence, it would appear that there is plenty of room to reduce the dimensions of the MEMS tips to increase storage densities way past what a magnetic drive can do.
2. Data transfer rate. In principle, the thousdands of different tips can all return data at the same time, compared to, say, 4 bits returned at once from a 4-platter HDD. Of course, in real situations, not all 4000 bits will necessarily be of interest, but I think with smart caching and device layout the throughput should be very high (i.e.: contiguous bits in a file are spread out so that the entire file is read by the 4000 tips without anything moving).
3. Low seek times. In a HDD, the head must move by many centimeters in order to seek randomly. In Millipede, the entire surface moves by, at most, 100 micrometers to find a new location. It probably uses piezoelectrics, which are fast and robust. Thus, I see seek times being lower (at least in a mature device).
4. Scalable. This prototype has a single array of tips on a single polymer layer. Obviously it is straightforward to build real devices using 10 or 20 of these arrays stacked. Unlike the platters in a HDD, these arrays could be seeking independantly, so if properly designed, performance could be very good (like RAID maybe?).
5. Heat. The piezos shouldn't heat up too much, and even though the tips themselves use pinpoint heating to deform the polymer, I think the bulk device heat would be lower than a HDD spinning at 10k rpm. Less noise too.
6. Cost. By using established MEMS technology (i.e.: the same lithography used to make microchips nowadays) I don't think implementation costs (and future scaling) will be too expensive (as compared to some more far-fetched nanotech ideas).
This has been in the works for a long time, but I think we may actually see real devices soon! (6 years?) I think this technology has real potential, and I think IBM is right to pursue it.
What the hell does that mean? I know a postage stamp, but I would rather know REAL standards. What is the LoC/FF for that item? We need to use real scientific standards people. In data storage we talk about bits and bytes, when you talk data density, you can only use LoC/FF. Anything else is ludicrous! It's like talking about car speeds at Furlongs per Week.
Geez. I wish journalistic integrity was a bit higher. It just irks me to-
What? What's LoC/FF?
Libraries of Congress per Football Field of course. You know, the standard.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
..was that this news is about 23 years old, and that's gotta be some kind of record. Even for Slashdot.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The article quotes 10,000 read/write cycles. Given that this number is probably a slight exagerration for PR purposes, it's a good start, but needs optimizing. Hopefully by the time this technology makes it to market, that will have increased that number enough that it will be competitive with magnetic drives. I think that this will definately be a viable replacement for flash drives.
The technology uses localized heating of a polymer past its glass transition. There is no reason that this should cause much material degredation if it is done properly (i.e.: avoiding temperature spikes, and engineering polymers that have an accessibly low glass-transition temperature while also being robust against thermal cycling). I think with enough engineering this could be done. There is alot of research on heating polymers past the glass-transition temperature, so they won't be reinventing the wheel or anything.
Holding enormous amounts of data becomes less and less useful in practical situations if you can't access a decent sized chunk of it quickly.
But how will we make a backup of those?
Just press it into a peice of silly putty to mirror the surface.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
1 Library of Congress = 10 terabyes = 80 terabits
1 terabit per chip
=> 1/80 Library of Congress per Chip
16.5mm x 17.5mm x 1.2mm = 346.5mm^2
Volume of VW Beetle: 7,710,952.32 mm^2
=> 22,253.83 chips per VW Beetle
=> 278.27 Libraries of Congress per VW Beetle
Help a College Student
We're getting there, but we're not there yet. And we won't be until storage is truly ubiquitous. I've actually spent some of my weekend re-organizing my music collection, ripping CDs that hadn't listened in a while, etc. But even with the 600G of storage in my PC, I still can't have everything I want unless it's compressed. And I'm thinking about how to listen to my collection in my car. Bringing hundreds of CDs around with me isn't practical. MP3 CDs hold maybe 10-20 albums. HDD based devices (ipods and the like) still can't hold everything I own... not even close. And I want to have a DVD server so rather than pulling out the DVD, I can just call up one of the hundreds of DVDs I own on a menu.
Yes, storage is becoming more impressive all the time. But it's still a very long way from being to the point where you don't have to think about how and where you store and move your files. And it will be very cool when that day comes.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
What this obviously means is that I'm one step closer to a cyberpunk style computer in my skull. Who needs to learn when you have google access directly interfaced with your brain?
God, I hope I'm kidding...
It seems to me that this kind of technology has been IBM's wild card for a long time. I think they've got a very good idea of what the face of the computer world will look like in a couple years, and they're doing everything they can to come out ahead. First they become a linux house, most likely because linux has proved to be a very nice archetecture to do things like clustering. Now they're finally using the nanotechnology they've been working on for years in such a way that they've created an amazing new technology like this. A technology, I might add, that has the potential to completely dominate the market and completely change the face of the computer world to the point where IBM is the largest hardware manufacturer in the world.....yet again. I'd love to see what's in their business plan for the next few years.
The question behind the questions is what potential roles that this product could fill.
If it can't run at room temperature conveniently, but can be made cheap per storage space and is reliable, then it may be useful in stationary servers for extreme-mass remote storage.
If it can run at room temperature and is somewhat affordable, but slow, it can be used as common backup.
If it can end up close but superior to hard disk in all aspects, then it may replace them.
If it can be fast enough to be used as live memory at room temperature, with conventional memory as cache, then even with a few limitations, it could transform the nature of computers as we experience them.
There's many, many other possibilities. Yes, of course, as you suggest, price will match the market - but the role this technology can play is limited more by it's logical capability than the market. If the possibility is open, it's usually much more of an opportunity if you can create a new technology in a market than to just replace another. That's why my questions are obvious - we all wonder how far this first generation of nanotechnology will take us.
Ryan Fenton
He's not joking, he's expressing disgust with the media's continuous habit of dumbing down units of measurement to the point where they're meaningless. It's irritating to those who actually know what a square millimeter and a bit are.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It seems, from all I've read about this millipede technology, that the real bugaboo is re-writing bits. I'm wondering just how important that really is. While I would preserve the ability to destroy data (easily implemented by writing pits at every location) I think that 99% of the uses of this massive storage could be done without re-writing.
Let me think of a couple of scenarios for these chips:
1) Music storage and playback, as in an Ipod.
This is a perfect example of something that you never need erase. You very rarely want to replace the previous version of a song with a newer one -- mostly you just want to add to your collection. In the very odd case that I never want to hear a song ever again, I could destroy it.
2) My own business -- visual effects.
We scan and create a few terabytes a year of images. Perhaps surprisingly, we throw almost none of them away during production, keeping old versions of images as reference. Disks are cheap enough that there's no need to erase frames during a project, and these millipede devices promise to be rugged and permanent enough to act as their own long-term backup. We'd just disconnect the drives and store them on a shelf forever.
Clearly, we'd want to change the way that filesystems work -- maybe the directory structure would be kept in flash memory where just the data bytes are on the millipede surface until it's time to inter the disk in the archive.
I think that IBM, and others, should really consider the possibility of non-rewritable millipedes, especially because abandoning that capacity would appear to make everything else much much simpler and cheaper. They might make it into production sooner too.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.