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A 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive?
Angry_Admin writes "Rather than spend millions of dollars for an array of hard drives when you can have all that storage on just one drive? A story at P2P.net US inventor Michael Thomas, owner of Colossal Storage, says he's the first person to solve non-contact optical spintronics which will in turn ultimately result in the creation of 3.5-inch discs with a million times the capacity of any hard drive - 1.2 petabytes of storage, to be exact. According to the article, In the past, data storage has only been able to orient the direction a field of electrons as they move around a molecule, Thomas said. "But now there's a way to rotate or spin the individual electrons that make up, or surround, the molecule," he says. He expects a finished product to be on the market in about four to five years, adding the cost would probably be in the range of $750 each."
"Rather than spend millions of dollars for an array of hard drives when you can have all that storage on just one drive?"
1. That sentence didn't make any sense.
2. So my PETABYTES of data don't all go down the tube at once.
I think I've already got one of these. It's right between my cold fusion device and my copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
Ok. But I call bullshit first!
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
But where am I going to store next week's pr0n?
I'd rather have the current flash technology improved as compared to that mechanical technology. I thought that's where we were heading. I guess I was wrong.
Of pron... or maybe mp3's. Hell, I can afford to store both now.
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand this sig, and those that beat up people who do.
Sounds kinda like American Computer Company
Sounds like 1.2 Petabytes of hurt if and when that thing bytes the dust.
"But now there's a way to rotate or spin the individual electrons that make up, or surround, the molecule"
Yeah, they do the stuff with the electrons using Heisenberg compensators.
Um... 1.2 PB is definitely *not* "a million times the capacity of any hard drive", unless you're still stuck with 1.2 GB hard drives.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Did you actually read the first sentence of your story.... because it dosnt make any sense...
Looks like I will be stocking up on quite a few of these for my recreational porn collection
Can you imagine what happens when this thing crashes? That is going to be one long restore...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I love it when stories are posted purely for their comic value.
Where's the foot?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Finally, I can download all that pron without getting those "disk out of memory" messages.
There should be a "-1:Groupthink"
A 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive?
No, 640 TB should be enough for everyone.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,028,835.WKU.&OS=PN/6,028,835&RS =PN/6,028,835
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,046,973.WKU.&OS=PN/6,046,973&RS =PN/6,046,973
Inventions by Michael E. Thomas under U.S. Patents, # 6,028,835 2/22/00 and # 6,046,973 4/4/00 concepts in this home page are for laboratory discussion and possible licensing and sale only.
I call BS.
How long would it take to format 1.2 petabyes?
500 GB drives are widely available. 1.2 Petabytes / 500 Gigabytes = 2400
2400 is less than 1000000, no?
Seems every few months we get a story about a wonder just a few years down the road. Most never get here, and none on the original optimistic schedule.
Where are the holographics DVDs? A few years out, which is where they were a few years ago.
OLEDs are finally showing up on small displays but remember it was only a few years ago we were promised they would supplant Plasma and LCD in 'just a couple of years?' They might do it someday, but not this year.
And so on.
Democrat delenda est
Crackdot? Slashpot? Well, at least Slashdot kinda rhymes with crackpot...
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
An electron has 720' rotational symmetry (see: Brief History of Time) so if they spin it too far, it'll become a positron. Since they've no way of detecting the rotation of an electron (it's a point charge) other than seeing if it explodes when it strikes another electron, this could definitely be an interesting - if short-lived - storage mechanism.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
http://p2pnet.net/story/842/
Seems to me he has been at this for some time, I would not count him out just yet. A peer review of his work though would be good news.
Christ, how many times are we promised phenomenal increases in storage, processing power, batteries, etc that are only "4-5 years away"? IF the technology ever materializes, it's usually a shadow of its former self, offering the standard increases we're used to (Moore's Law or thereabouts, depending on the tech). This isn't news until prototype units are done and working, as far as I'm concerned.
Meanwhile, how would you access the data? What bus would be fast enough for storage of that magnitude? How do you back it up, except to other drives of its type? What's the reliability predicted to be like (especially on such a new technology)?
Lots of questions, few answers.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Brilliant!!! Hook a server up to ONE hdd so you can lose EVERYTHING at once.
With this much space, would we be able to have a "Complete collection of world music" on one Hard Disk - and would I be able to copy the whole thing off my friend in one shot?
Forgetting the law here, $750 is a small price to pay to have a near complete collection of recorded music. I think drives like this will prove popular.
The xxAAs won't have brown underpants for nothing.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
"Finally, I can cache the internet!"
"The hard drive racket will never let this see the light of day!"
"RAI(E)D: Redundant Array of Insanely Expensive Disks."
"Now, if he was talking about RAM, I'd be impressed."
"B-B-B-But Moore said!...."
That has been a long standing question with some friends at work: how much pr0n really is too enough pr0n? The common answer has been 1 PetaByte. 750$? Where can I order one from? ;)
Is that before or after rebate?
Breaking News!
Really expensive hard drives will be much bigger in 4-5 years than really expensive hard drives are now!
In 4-5 years, almost no one will be spending $750 on a hard drive. The prices of hard drives have dropped from $5000 to under $100, even for a decently sized drive.
come up with something.
All I've read from the pudits slamming so far is total crap.
The Nay sayers have No new ideas, No concepts, nada. Just Brain Farts without any data disproving Thomas' technology !
His Physics looks good and his target fit memory roadmaps for nanotechnology.
No. Thank you.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Laser Holography will allow parallel read/write operations.
When they ship, I'll order 2 of them. They'll be perfect to make a backup of that /dev/random file.
Yikes, how many DVD-Rs would it take to back that up? Hmmmm...let's see what Google says:
4 .7+gigabytes
http://www.google.com/search?q=1.2+petabytes+%2F+
Only about 268,000 DVD-Rs. Cut that in half if you're using dual-layer DVD-Rs.
.....but can I make a Beowulf cluster out of them? For my Linux distro's? Seriously though. I welcome the day when disk space is so readily available, preferably for a sum of money which is equal to "not a lot".
All of the brightest boys, To play with the biggest toys - More than they bargained for...
1,351,079,888,211,149 bytes
1/74th of Data's full storage capacity on Star Trek
1/45th of all the files shared on Kazaa
1/3rd of Google's total storage capacity
Half a Vista installation
938,249,922 Floppy disks
208 KB of storage for each person on this planet.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
If you think a simple hard drive is impressive, check out the bottom of the article where it describes his other project
Thomas is a 30-year pioneer whose projects include a computer with a 3D display, instant response, able to run every available OS and application simultaneously, virtually no power consumption or moving parts and complete security - and whose physical component is about the size of a pack of playing cards.
Now that makes a 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive in 4 years almost believeable!
We can now put all our data into 1 folder and run a p2p app.
In capitalist west you backup 1.2 Petabyte of data.
In Soviet Union KGB have same 1.2 Petabyte of your data.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Admittedly, I've no degree in physics (just engineering), so I can't say for sure one way or the other on the science of this. However, the presentation of this article, and that of the Optocom, sounds a whole lot like a snake oil salesman. "It'll fix what ails ya -- you'll never need another hard disk again! I was reviewing Einstein/Plank and Niels Bohr Atomic Theories, and suddenly the panacea for computers came to me." I get the feeling that the science of this is shaky, and that this is being used as a marketing gimmick to get research money.
This hard drive will come optional on the first Toyota flying car, and will come preinstalled with Duke Nukem Forever.
Spin is quantized, either 1/2 up or down. Electrons also can't have all 4 quantum numbers the same, so electron pairs have one +1/2 spin and one -1/2 spin. You can't change that so long as electrons are Fermions.
This guy is trying to tell people he can control electron spin? That would be quite a trick.
Would you then have a peta- cemetary for your data?
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
An array of peta-drives makes much more sense.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Can you imagine world where it takes 12 hours to download all the images of the latest cyber girl of the month?
You just got troll'd!
Storage has to be the first element of computers to increase by 1000x and get to the point where we don't care anymore.
It's frikkin dots! Of course we're going to be able to fit more than a few billion dots in 200 cm^3
We've all seen the size of a 1 gig micro sd card and these are all rewrittable technologies.
If you could release a 10 terabyte drive tommorow do you think anyone would care if you couldn't delete anything from it?
If this happened, you'd see random explosions all the time. Electron - positron conversion hasn't been detected yet so a simple rotation is definitely not going to be converting electrons to positrons. Hell, if it did we'd have antimatter bombs floating around all over the place.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
now that would definitely take a long time to defrag
As data densities have increased, physically moving the storage devices has become faster than broad band transmission of data between storage devices.
ie shipping hard drives rather than using fiber. (or for that matter using carrier pigeons and FlashRam.)
How long will it be before we have a coast to coast pneumatic tube system to ship data?
Or even better, an evacuated ballistic subway for delivering harddrives..
Come to think of it, how about a continuous loop of "data tape" which encircles the globe at ground level, and orbits within an evacuated pipeline.
heh heh. Its not really that far fetched.
* Does it run Linux?
* Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these bad boys.
* In Soviet Russia, hard drive store 1.2 PB on YOU!!
* In Korea, only old people use hard drives.
one Office 13 install, aka Office 2010 The Year We Make Contact Pro Edition.
Does this mean LBA48 is soon going to be obsolete?
--- I'd love to go out with you, but I have to study for a Turing test.
At least we'll have enough space to store it!
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Imagine how slow something like this would be? It would take months just to copy that much data onto the drive... how long would it take to index or seek? Are there file systems that support that much space in one volume? Oh well, the article is probably BS anyway...
I don't have any desktop machines, only laptops, including a laptop as a server running NetBSD. How much could a 2.5" HDD store with this technology?
* I for one, welcome our 1.2PB overlords.
* There are 1.2PB drives.... IN JAPAN
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Just enough space for a Vista install!
Seems a hard drive crash can cause a small explosion. Only 10 kilotons so it's nothing to be alarmed about but the military has taken an interest in the new technology.
I would also question the usefulness of the proposed system. I am not confident you could change the spin of anything at that scale for any useful length of time. Too many variables and too much "noise". If you want to change a property, it needs to be a property that can "latch" in whatever state you place it and have no trivial way of unlatching itself without significant input. Otherwise, your data will degrade very rapidly.
There are two ways to "store" data - permanently or erasably. Permanent storage is much simpler, in that there need not be any way of reversing the process. It's better to do this in a mechanical form, because you can have a much higher density. Erasable storage is better as solid-state, because erasable mechanical storage will wear out rapidly, which means it's not particularly reliable or trustable over meaningful periods of time.
Permanent storage that is high density is relatively simple. You could have a mix of two molecules which are highly stable but, when energy is delivered, react to form something different. Since different molecules absorb energy at different wavelengths, the absorption pattern would give you your 1s and 0s. Molecules are extremely small, compared to magnetic fields or even to the "blisters" formed on CDROMs to store data. You can also look at multiple bits at the same time, with this method. Unlike conventional magnetic media, a read-head need not be serially streaming data but could read as much in parallel as you liked. This WOULD be permanent, though, so would only be useful as a means of replacing CDROMs or DVDs, but would be far more expensive per byte of data and would only offer an advantage where you needed such a system to be considerably faster and vastly more durable.
Erasable non-volatile storage is a tougher problem, as you need something that can be altered by an electric current in both directions and where the change could be read through some alteration in an electric current. This can get to be a problem, if you want extremely high densities of storage, as all the supporting electronics will take space and will likely take space for each and every single bit of data. (Pun intended.) Usually, there is some magnetic component to such systems (magnets are good at holding states) OR a battery backup, as transistors won't hold a state when there is no power to them. There are many ways of building such an arrangement, with different methods having different speeds for read and write and different densities of storage.
I would assume that one could (ab)use "electron migration" to store information, provided an easy way of resetting the electrons existed. This would have the benefit of not needing any magnetic mechanisms (which may mean you could get higher densities) but it would certainly be slower to write to, and likely to read from. I would suspect that something similar will offer much better opportunities for solid-state non-volatile storage in the future, precisely because it should be capable of far higher densities.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
1.2 PB is all well and good until you format it and the fucker only has 300 Gigs.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drive#.22Marke
There is truth in humor.
How long could we expect something like this to last? How long would it safely archive data? This is an issue that is becoming more and more relevant, seeing as information is now almost universally stored in digital format.
The guy's website reads like any other vaporware marketing scheme. Instead of wasting $750 on this "storage technology", hop on over to Alex Chiu's website, and get yourself some eternal life!
I wonder if the guy that submitted it did it cuz he realized how insanely funny the claims are, or if hes one of the morons who actually beleive more than the .03% of "news" headlines on p2p sites (only that last .03% has any chance of being real, and pops up like a month after it does here on /., cnet, or wired)...
Apparently Mr. Thomas forgot that there are classifications above Peta. How about Exa- or Zetta- or Yotta-bytes? Wouldn't those have more impact for your story/invention?
The last thing I want is for my computer to go crazy and burn my wife's fur coats (well, if we could afford such things), destroy all the meat in my fridge, "liberate" my pets, and spray paint "animal killer" all over my house as it distributes comics about how all the parents in the neighborhood are evil animal slaying people. It'd be almost as bad as putting XP on my Mac...
Who on earth would want one of these PETA drives? Or PETA taking a bite out of your computer (assuming your computer is made only of vegetable material, of course)?
Thomas is a 30-year pioneer whose projects include a computer with a 3D display, instant response, able to run every available OS and application simultaneously, virtually no power consumption or moving parts and complete security - and whose physical component is about the size of a pack of playing cards.
Wake me up when^H^H^H^H *if* this ever comes to pass. If I had a gigabyte for every claim I've heard that the next mammoth-sized storage technology (usually optical-based) was just around the corner, I'd already *have* my 1.2 petabytess
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Where am I going to find that much porn?
I fail to understand the claim that this means there is no need to backup the data. There is no such thing as disk drive that can't break. The article makes the claim of backup not needed, but offers no evidence whatsoever as to why. I don't no about everyone else, but I'd hate to lose over a petabyte of data because I believed a claim of backup not needed. Of course I haven't filled up my 60GB drive yet, so I don't think I'll need this much storage for a while anyway.
Oh my... I just went to their webpage. I haven't clicked anything, but their lack of product and development focus and the sheer incredulity of some of their products is reminiscent of the stuff advertised in the back of Mad Magazine. All they need is X-ray glasses, sea monkeys and a secret decoder ring. And a hoverconversion kit for 1981-1983 Delorean DMC-12 sports cars.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I see how this lends itself to no data compression (in a world where everything originates on your computer, and nothing has to be transfered over a network or the internet), but is there a reason these drives are incapable of failing?
4-5 years from now I'm going to need that much storage just to compensate for all the damn formats of the same file I have to keep for everyone.
I can see it now, the "next Google" is going to be a picture of some kid in their moms garage with one of theese things hooked up to a video Ipod.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
*fart* hi vlad!! *fart*
The next Alex Chiu?
... but since I've seen Mac on Intel, I'll believe anything...
Well?
So, these are the drives for the Phantom Console, right? Man, when those things come out, they are going to be sweet!
I think this is just another PETA publicity stunt.. Eat meat! :D
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
Think of the uses for which the average person uses his hard drive:
Email; web; instant messaging. Twenty jigabytes at MOST.
Now think of what the person who will fill this sized hard drive to capacity will use it for:
Pirated music; pirated software; perverse poronographic imagery (most certainly pirated), and other anti-social material.
There is absolutely no rational reason that any law abiding citizen could EVER need a hard drive of this size.
In fact, perhaps there should be a law on hard drives over 100 GB; I know I certainly don't have over 100 GB of emails or IM logs or web cache.
Just a thought.
Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
--Ronald Reagan
I think I've already got one of these. It's right between my cold fusion device and my copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
Don't be silly, dude. Everyony knows that Duke Nukem Forever is a Myth...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
nt
Umm, I don't think my BIOS supports petabytes... Anyone know where I can get a 64bit BIOS upgrade for my Abit BH-6?
How many times is this going to be reported? This is complete nonsense. It was nonsense the first time I read it, nonsense the second time, the third, and so forth. Do the Slashdot editors realise how many times they've posted this story in the past few years? I've seen it multiple times here.
If this hack's idea held any water some more information from sources other than the one man proclaiming it as the ultimate solution would be speaking up and writing about it. As of the past couple years it's only been his web site and morons who read it and believe it.
This place is starting to have the editorial standards of the National Enquirer...
*NM*
I Still think a flash harddrive would be great, maybe like a jump drive, except 300 gigs? lol
How long will it take for windows to format it????
One week or two?The guy also seems to be off his rocker in a few other ways: MPEG doesn't just save hard drive space, it saves space on the buses it travels over and the memory it resides in. There's a reason DV workstations require the resources they do. I also like how prototypes won't be built for "2 or 3" years, but he expects to get to market in "about 4 or 5".
1/74th of Data's full storage capacity on Star Trek
...runs at roughly 10Mhz (defined by the protagonist as "decisions per second").
Interesting, I've never heard that one before (yup, a non-Trekkie on Slashdot). So Data's got about 90PB of storage. Seems insane, right?
It's always neat to see what sci-fi authors think is going to be some insanely huge number, and neater to see how quickly those estimates seem quaint.
I just re-read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In it, the intelligent computer, who can perfectly simulate human voice, display a real-time, photorealistic face with perfect gestures complete with animated photorealistic background scenery, store most if not all of human knowledge, and generally do everything imaginable....
I'm sure this seemed really fast decades ago, yet today it's quaint. If by some miracle we could actually keep doubling hard drive capacities forever, we'll exceed Data in less than 20 years in a single 3.5" drive.
Scary, but also fun to look forward to.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
If I recall correctly, in 3001 Arthur C. Clarke asserts that a petabyte is enough to store the information comprising a single human (mind, body, etc.) You could store the art and the artist, as he put it.
So does that mean data stored on one of these drives would be called a peta...file? (I can't believe no one has cracked the petaphile joke yet.)
Imagine how much P0rn you can store on this drive...
"Can you imagine world without data compression? And where you never have to back anything up?"
What on earth does THAT mean? We won't need to compress anything because this technology will also allow us to transfer data at insanely high speeds? And we won't need backups because this technology will never fail to spin the electrons accordingly?
I doubt it. There are still advantages to buying an array of disks, unless of course this thing does actually magically prevent failure.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
And it is about the amount of data that will be stored each year per detector at the LHC (large Hadron Collider) in Switzerland. I remember as they were designing it how one of the big questions was on how to transfer all of that data from Europe to the US. One of the proposed solutions being to fed-ex (or some equivilant) boxes of magnetic tapes every day.
Like how will it make no need for backups? I'm curious as to how the technology would work. Is it solid-state like RAM? And my biggest question is the biggest problem with hardrives. How's the speed? Will this negate the need for RAMDRIVEs?
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Why does slashdot run these rediculous psudoscience stories?
I mean really, don't you guys have any self respect? Every week it some bs claim. Jesus.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Weird, 10 years ago I remember saying, "What the fuck am I gonna do with a Gig..." My friend told me then, and it still applies now, no matter what the storage limit is, "Fill it up with useless shit."
Shift happens. Fire it up.
What is to say that we don't have a lot of very tiny explosions all the time? Cosmic/background radiation, anyone?
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
NOW how many address bits will we need? Or, are we going to be using 4 GB block sizes in our filesystems?
http://outcampaign.org/
There comes a point when there's too much storage...
I know, I know: 640k and all that. Hear me out...
What would be the sum total of petabytes taken up by:
* every music performance ever
* every movie
* every television show
* For that matter, recordings of every word ever spoken by every human to have ever lived on earth?
(5 exabytes)
The human race supposedly produces 1-2 exabytes a year of information and that number is increasing.
Yes, yes, I know it's huge. Point is, sometime soon we're going to reach that sort of storage capacity. How soon is it going to be that someone announces that exabytes are available? If petabyte drives are around, exabyte arrays will be following shortly.
In my lifetime, we've gone from K to megs to gigs, and now terabytes. Not so long ago, I remember marvelling at the 1gig drives that were out (about 12 years ago now.)
If you take the subset of those items that includes "good" or desirable data for any given person, you have a much, much smaller sum of data.
I had this conversation with a friend who was asking if storage technology will be in demand forever. I told him I don't think it will, I think it will become a situation where you will have more than you could possibly ever need and wouldn't have any need for more. There's just a limit to the kind of data that people, especially normal consumers, are going to want to store.
'Course, one possible use for technology is computation caching, and the need for that is infinite.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Furthermore, if disks continues to grow as they have the last decade, doubling in size for the same price every 18 months or so, then in 4-5 years (the "estimated" release of this) it'll have doubled another 3 times, giving you 5GB disks, this is still a factor of 200 better than that -- but there's a difference between 200 and a million....
And to top it of, this is offcourse wild speculation -- any product that is claimed to be 4-5 years away from production and has not even a working prototype is pure vapor.
hmm...a company that has gone to the trouble to patent ideas that contain words and phrases used by various researches in quantum computing, but hasn't gone to the trouble of looking into ways to actually manufacture their products. It reminds me of the legal proceedings against RIM. Patent something that sounds cool and might one day be popular. Never develop it because you don't know how. Sue the hardworking people who actually make it work.
There's a reason for more than 1 drive--by puting disks into arrays, you not only maximize their capacity, but the speed at which they read/write data. Having a 1.2 PB drive isn't as useful as having four 600 TB disks configured to do RAID 0+1, for example.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
He expects a finished product to be on the market in about four to five years, adding the cost would probably be in the range of $750 each.
Prediction: By the time this guy gets his product to market, existing incumbant hard disk makers will have improved hard drive technology to capcities equal to his and without some huge IP licensing fee adding to the retail price.
Hmm, why is it that I don't feel quite confident about the validity of his claims... Could it be that we hear this type of overconfident hype about 'Real soon now ... the greatest invention in history...' all too often?
Sure wouldn't want to defrag one of these things... My 40gb system/application drive takes long enough...stupid windows...
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
In my Moller SkyCar...
-- My Weblog.
While all you wrote is indeed insightful and true and very relevant, one doesn't even have to go that far to see why his "invention" is just bogus crap. The reason it won't work is quantum mechanics. Some basic knowledge of chemistry also helps, in that it's just applied quantum mechanics.
I'll dumb the explanation back a bit for the benefit of those (tbh, myself included) who don't have quantum physics as their day job. I.e., if you're a physicist, don't flip out if the terminology isn't just right or the exact equations are missing.
The thing is, the available states for electrons on a given "orbit" are a finite and well defined set. No two electrons may have the same state. I.e., if an atom has 2 electrons (helium), they can't both have the same orbit and state.
The inner layers already have the full set, so there's no way to flit an electron's spin there and still have it stay in that orbit: that would require it to have the same state as another electron there, which is strictly impossible.
The outer layer may have an incomplete set, but that's why mollecules and crystals form. E.g., the reason you find hydrogen as H2 (or bonded to other atoms, of course) and not as individual H atoms, is that they basically share their electrons to form a complete set. Or when you have a mollecule like CH4 (methane), each Hydrogen atom basically gets an electron from the Carbon atom to form its complete set, while the Carbon atom gets an electron from each Hydrogen atom because it needs 4 more to have the full set.
So you could only flip individual electrons from the outer layer if you kept those atoms as free atoms, not part of a mollecule or crystal. Otherwise, again, he'd try to create a situation where two electrons have the same position and state.
So how's he going to achieve that? The only atoms that stay free like that are those which, like say Helium or Neon, already have a full outer set, so they're useless there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Historical data" is of course the limited sample of the hard drives I've bought with typical desktop computers :-) from 200 Mb in 1994 to 300 Gb this year.
Convert into logarithmic scale, make a linear regression, and you see that a 1.2 Pb drive is only slightly above the curve, hence believable if you suppose that progress in this industry will continue at the same rate. I have no idea if the technology of the article makes sense though.
Caveat: Of course, blindly extrapolating current trends into the far future is the best way to make big mistakes...
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
Now I can put it with all my room temperature superconducting devices.. does techno babble ever stop.. and all the promises of cheap this, and huge that ever end... in 5 years I'll have a fusion power source driving my car.. .
A very short classic sci fi story that tells us where we're heading! http://home.comcast.net/~bcleere/texts/draper.html
With a RAID array you could limit the damage, just as you do in current implementations. Or let me put it another way: do you still have 100*1GB harddrives in an array so you know when one harddrive fails the other 99GB is still intact ?
I think they mean 1.2 PB per platter, although we're way above 1.2 GB per platter :)
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
I started singing the "Vaporware" song before I even hit 'comments'.
But if he does manage to manufacture them, I'll finally have somewhere to store my plans for my ZPM, FTL drive, and BFG. Maybe there will still be room for the my plans to conquer this planet. Oh never mind, that sounds like the plans.
1) Read Slashdot
2) Find Petabyte hard drive
3) ???
4) Conquer the world!
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
When will slashdot learn how to spell ridiculous?
It is ridiculous to spell ridiculous as rediculous.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
Anyone else seem to find it funny that an article containing so many scientific buzzwords has so many spelling and grammatical errors in it?
Even aside from the fact that some of the things mentioned in this article could have been pulled straight out of Star Trek and have little or not relation to actual scientific principles..
Splut.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
How many people will then do the obvious and make a peta-file....How are we going to register all these offenders?
I must know how to invest in this company! Won't someone pleeeeease take all my money?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
for a moment. We don't just use massive storage arrays to allow us to 'access a load of data' they also provide many other benefits. Drive mirroring/parity allows you to integrate backup into your system - one physical device fails and no data is lost.
The main issue is access speed. Most data centres are continuously supplying small amounts of data to a huge number of clients. With a single unit and with a single head that's going to be a massive problem - array can simultaneously read and supply data from the different drives at the same time.
I have to say that any storage story we ever post inevitably prompts someone (I'm assuming someone from the company) to post a reference about Colossal Storage. It's annoying as all hell.
I would need today ten harddrives of those. In 4 years I may need another 100.
I hope it is not vaporeware!
I've been working on perfecting my algorithm for 1-bit compression and should have it ready to go in the next 3 to 5 years. Once released you'll be able to encrypt and compress all of your data down to a single bit. The algorithm will run effectively on processors found in most cell phones; it's not processor intensive. This will eliminate the need for big storage devices and high bandwidth connections.
I know it is too late to write anything and someone actually read it... :-D but...
Nowaday I get more worried about reliability then capacity, sure changing spins in eletrons can be fun and squeeze more the one terabyte (or it would be terabibytes, whatever), but would that electron maintain that specific spin for how long? ten years? one year? two weeks?
I would buy a cd sized that would hold something like a cd, 700Mb, and would keep its data if I drove a car over it and subject it to a oven, followed by a freezer temperature. this would be cool! I want a media reliable for my backups.:-)
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Some time ago a funny company announced a
Now we have this huge HD announcement.
Within a month or two we will have also announcements for a laptop battery weighing just half a pound and lasting one year and a 5 megapixel LCD display 2mm thin.
This is the real good of the Internet!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Wow.. just look at Internet Explorer trying to use up all that disk space.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The basic problem is: you can't identify individual electrons. No way. Not ever. When they're circling an atom they're not discernible particles per se- they're an anonymous and homogenous cloud of probability. You can apply some energy and peel one electron off, but it's not like you're picking a particular electron. It's not like a bag of marbles and you're picking a particular one of a particular color. It's more like a jar of molasses and you're scooping out a spoonful.
Also electron spin isnt something that's latched to any one electron. Electrons exchange virtual photons many millions of million of times per second, which scrambles their properties.
So to beat this dead horse again: there's absolutely nothing to this story.
2001
2010
2069
3001
Silly person. He wanted to release 3001 at midnight on the 1st Jan 2001 but in the end released it earlier.
Could I get mine pre-loaded with every possible Microsoft Word document? That way when my boss asks for a report on any topic, I can just use Google desktop search to find the report I need, without having to write it.
Someone raises this inane objection every single time larger storage media are discussed. The solutions are so obvious that they hardly bear repeating, but let's start with the simplest: buy two of them.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Wouldn't a file on one of these be a petafile? :)
If con is the opposite of pro. Then isn't congress the opposite of progress?
117
Ok, I don't get it, so I will finally ask. What is with Google. You get 117 results, but I only get 92. Where are the rest, and why don't I get them? (yes, my prefs are any language, safe search off).
is a harddrive with two separate sets of heads on two separate arms -- one for writing and one for reading. This would be very handy for real-time, high-speed, high-volume data collection systems. It'd be nice to not have to reposition the write heads when you're doing random-access reads from the same drive. Nicer still would be two separate SCSI interfaces to the separate head sets.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
This article is purely ridiculous. There is no way in hell we could hope to even identify a discrete electron, let alone manipulate its spin. We know of electrons as being in clouds, clouds of a probablistic nature. We know where the electrons are LIKELY to be, but we can't know where an electron IS. You can give an atom a kick of energy that exceeds the first ionization energy of the atom and strip off a RANDOM electron, but that's the end of it.
Electrons in this probablistic cloud also change their spins and exchange energy all the time, so even if you could change the spin of one, it would just change again almost immediately..
This is the kind of crap that startups would come up with - lots of big scientific words that VCs didn't understand, mixed in with almost insane notions of a technological leap.
In 1999, you could walk into a VC's office talking about how you would "apply a modified fourier process to faraday's law to stochastically manipulate the probablistic properties of non-ionized electrons to gain a quantum leap in bit densities, resulting in a 1000 fold increase in syncronous dynamic bit densities in a RAM chip" and walk out with $2million in cash, with which you would proceed first to the local LL-Bean store for some sandals and then to the BMW dealership. The, all you'd have to do is pay yourself $100k/year to pretend to do research, and then when it's all dried up, disappear to some tropical island.
Looks like we have it all over again lately.
I hear the makers of the phantom gaming system are going to use this in their product.
Cram more and more data into a single drive, and you run the risk of losing a lot more when it fails.
What are we going to use to back up all this data? I guess another one of those drives. RAID!
Chris
I especially liked the quantum entanglement instant messenger. In all seriousness has entanglement even been demonstrated in a scale of meters yet?
Are you in... China?
PETA-cemetary a play on PET cemetetary. HYUK, HYUK, HYUK. you guys.
When I first accessed the internet, over 15 years ago, I thought, wow, eventually all computers would become thin clients and our data will be stored in server facilities that could offer fast, large capacity storage and ensure our data is always backed up, safe and secure.
How naive was I?
I still feel that I would prefer to have offsite storage for data. I have lost entire music libraries, personal digital pictures and videos simply because the 80 then 120 then 250 gb hard drive in my computer failed.
I have taken to backing up data, but how does one back up 200+ gb of data without spending a fortune on tape backup which never has proven to be really that secure? Buy a second 200+ gb hard drive and hope for the best I guess? Or, you could implement a redundant RAID system, if money wasn't an issue.
In the end, I have been longing for an online service that would offer 100's of GB of storage, not just 100mb or 2gb of email storage, but 100's of gigabytes of online storage available at a reasonable monthly rate where I could save my important data file in a safe and secure environment. This service would ensure the data is backed up and kept safe by implementing RAID systems and backup technologies that I can't afford. Then I could know that regardless of my local hard drive crapping out, or a house fire, or theft, my important data is always kept safe on an offsite server.
Security and privacy issues aside, I think the problem is that it is still too costly to offer millions of subscribers 100+ gigabytes of data storage online. While the internet is fast enough to access offsite storage, there simply isn't enough capacity in desktop hard drives to both provide the required storage AND make sure the storage is redundant and safe using RAID systems.
So, perhaps we shouldn't laugh at the idea of a Petabyte hard drive. I don't see any reason why anyone would need that amount of storage at home. But perhaps this would enable a service that is sorely missing from the internet, the idea of ubiquitous access to your personal data, the thousands of music files, photos, videos and other data that can be kept safe and secure and always available regardless of how many times your local hard drive dies or damages or looses that important data. I for one say, bring it ON!
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
You know, if you really want people to believe you, don't announce a product until you have one finished. This guy obviously never learned that lesson, and it would appear that this could indeed be bullshit.
See, if I ever think of anything truly stupendous, I won't blab about it until I have a working model, or at least something that people can look and prod at to see if it's reasonable. That's how you get this little thing called 'credibility'. I don't think PB hard drives are going to be coming for a while, at least not from this guy. Why worry about it, anyway? We already have perpendicular storage on the way, and that's been showing promise since the 1970's. Furthermore, I kind of doubt there'd be much of a market for this stuff. That's... really a bit too much data on one drive, if you asked me. Too much to loose at once, or have stolen at once. Not a good idea to replace an array with this.
i remember an article from an old computer magazine from 1990 ... in which some company claimed to have invented infinate compression. the reporter, somewhat skeptical, visited them and confirmed that they did, indeed, have the ability to compress previously compressed files with very impressive ratios at every compression ... so much so that they could, in theory, reduce the entire contents of the library of congress to a single (3.5") floppy disk. the problem that the company was on the verge of solving was ... de-compression of their compressed format. but they were nearly there ... just 2-3 years away.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
I get 92, but if you go to the last page, and click the "repeat the search with the omitted results included." link, I get 96.
Moreover, I can get 125 if I use the new experimental Google server.
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I get 92 too.
I don't have a sig.
CompUSA has them for $99 after the 4 year rebate!
The instance I like to bring up was when Graham Bell announced that he had come up with a device which could transmit voice miles and miles along a thin copper wire.
Very Smart People guffawed and ridiculed the man. They provided detailed scientific explanations in the journals of the day for why such a claim was utterly ridiculous. They illustrated beyond any doubt that it was impossible for sound waves to carry any appreciable distance down a copper tube which was less than an 8th of an inch in diameter. They laughed and derided and felt very sure of themselves.
So while several warning lights do go off with this guy's claims, (Bell actually had a device to show the world), I'd be careful to close doors on possibilities without having more information. The key is Patience, being Non-Biased and being open to and willing to go looking for New Information rather than sitting on one' arse and letting CNN tell us what is real.
-FL
Don't let this be vapor! I can produce 6 GB on a busy weekend (photos, mostly weddings) and each 18 months a new camera with 30% larger files comes out. I have a small mountain of external drives, and have been praying for something like this. But, INHO the more grandiose an initial announcment is, the more likely I'm never going to see anything like it. What do you think? Have I found an answer to my dreams, or should I go back to bed?
San Francisco Photographers
- With a 3D display
- Instant response (does that mean all applications execute instantly?)
- Runs every available Os and Application simultaneously
- Uses virtualy no power consumption or moving parts
- Has COMPLETE SECURITY
- Is about the size of a pack of playing cards
Sounds like the basis for my perfect notebook system!Sounds like Spin to me.
The VCs probably love however.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Funny, that's what I thought Quantum Numbers are for:
The Principal Quantum Number
The Azimuthal Quantum Number
The Magnetic Quantum Number
The Spin Quantum Number
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
One word. Spindle-Bound. Ok it was two words, but they are hyphenated.
Who's leg do I have to hump to get a dry martini around here?
1E28 or 1E29 atoms in a human, times enough bits to store the state information of each. Extremely compressible ("hemoglobin at x, y, z, with/without oxygen, variation e, orientation theta, phi") though.
If you oculd map and represent someone's mind well enough to store it, the scientific and ethical implications would be mind-blowing.
It might be cheaper to store DNA sequences (750MB uncompressed) + life experience (sensory bandwidth * 1E9 seconds) and simulate the growth of the human.
Me, I'm wondering what kind of file system you'd put on a petabyte disk. Some kind of versioned, never-erase FS?
I mean I have probably own between 50 and 75 hard drives since the mid 80's. I upgraded 80% of the time for one reason, lack of space. So now that I have a drive large enough to record every waking moment of my life why would I need another for anything other then backup?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
How many companies are there that are promising products in the near future that violate the basic laws of quantum mechanics? There's the blacklight power people, now these clowns. These things are for the early 21st century what perpetual motion machines were for the early 20th.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Anyone ever seen The Sixth Day?
Performance??
How long it would take to do the initial scrub on a four drive array (RAID 6 per parent) of these drives?
Had this guy called himself an engineer or a physicist, I might believe his claims.
Calling yourself an inventor is more or less calling yourself a hackjob. And a lot of people do it. An engineer is well-educated, and is also well aware of what is and isn't possible, and work well within those bounds to create these designs. Physics can work outside these boundaries, albeit cautiously.
An "inventor" has a brilliant idea, grabs a first-year physics textbook, and grabs the first thing he sees as evidence to back it up.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Yes, there are theoretical quantum numbers that describe an electron. But you can't measure any of them without destroying the property. And they're not at any one particular value for more than an attosecond. And you can't match up properties with individual electrons, because there are no extra dimensions of freedom to tag electrons with. In computer lingo, for a viable memory, you need to have address:value pairs, but with electrons, there are no addresses, and no stable values either. Kinda totally skunked from the get-go.
Experimental google server?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Can't you identify electrons from different shells? This is from classes long ago, but I thought for the first couple rows of the periodic table, that the s, p, and d shells were discernable?
this guy needs to write a note to al gore and apologize for using al gore's internet to claim that more of al gore's inventions are really his.
sheesh! does he thin we were born yesterday?
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I agree with your sentiments. I've been tracking a number of technologies over a fairly long timespan, and a good rule of thumb I've noticed is that if they are researching in the lab and have a somewhat working prototype, we are 5-10 years from the first commercial product, and when we get that first commercial product, we are about 5 years from widescale deployment (assuming the technology gets proper funding, and actually becomes accepted) This rule has worked for WiFi, bluetooth, cell phones, dvd players, etc. Using this rule, I'd say we are about 5 years from seeing widescale adoption of OLED's about 5 years from seeing HD-DVD (or Blue Ray) in widescale use. As for a 1.2 petabyte hard drive, I'd say that's probably 5-10 years out (Probably closer to 10), but I doubt the above referenced company will have anything to do about it.
...this is in the Hardware section and not the Science section.
/. you have to have multiple advanced degrees... including CS, EE, Chem, Physics, Law, and a host of others. Maybe we should start a /. scholarhip so our future readers won't be as dumb as we are.
Or maybe it shouldn't even be here... it should be in the Science Fiction section. So far, all this guy has is an idea... not even a proof of concept. He's just got an idea about what he wants to do, not a mechanism for acheiving the desired effect.
Twenty years ago, people writing this sort of thing would be called Sci-Fi Writers.
Internet journalism perhaps has created nothing more than the world's largest gossip factory. To really process all of what comes down the line here at
The idea sounds great in theory, but the method for storing data is admittedly too fragile to be put into practical use anytime in the near future. I recall reading in other articles on the topic that even the slightest external magnetic fields could corrupt data stored this way. Ironically, traditional magnetic storage is far more tolerant to external magnetic fields.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animal Bytes?
This is ridiculous.
You better start formatting that puppy now, as it'll take about 20,480,000 hours to format(2,338 years)!
You may think you understand what you thought I said, but what you thought you heard was not what I meant!
Linux now supports hot-swapping of actual RAM, which introduces the possibility of physically transferring live, active threads between machines without the need for a physical network. Not sure how useful this would be in practice, but the pure geek value in such a demonstration would surely turn a LOT of heads in the IT profession.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
... with money and research.
:
His website is an effort to garner finance basically. He is looking for Ph.D. employees who he *might* be able to employ once he has finance. And I suppose he'd expect the Doctors (Doctors Who?) to answer all his questions for him.
His 'inventions' are pipe dreams than he hasn't solved yet.
Strange that he would let his cat out of his bag.
From: http://colossalstorage.net/home_display_lens.htm
'
Employment Opportunities
Colossal Storage is seeking advisors turning into possible research positions with strong research experience in one or more of the following areas of materials research
structural, electronic and optical properties of nanostructures, surfaces, ferroelectrics, polar dielectrics, perovskites, nonlinear optical properties of noncentrosymmetric materials, interfaces and multilayers; optics and photonics; computational and statistical materials physics; modification and characterization of materials UV laser beam or MOCVD plasma techniques.
Applicants must have a Ph.D. degree, a record of outstanding research accomplishments and a commitment to excellence.
Colossal Storage when funded will offer above standard salaries together with a full spectrum of stock options, employee benefit programs, family friendly environment, and social benefits. Candidates should submit a curriculum vitæ, a summary of current and planned research activities.
Colossal Storage invites applications for strong interaction theory. Applications are encouraged from candidates with a Ph.D. degree in theoretical or particle physics and that are interested in pursuing theoretical research within a broad range of physics, such as laser/photon theory, solid state physics, advanced ferroelectric materials research, laser diode research, plasma physics, electrostatics/fluorescent and charged particle ultraviolet research on Quantum electrons, photon induced electric poling in ferroelectric, optical fiber and laser diode applications and Development, measurement of ferroelectric ceramic charged molecules, density field theories and many more areas Not covered.
Candidates must have demonstrated outstanding research accomplishments and show a commitment to excellence in research at the undergraduate, graduate and have 5 years of hands on research experience. Applicants should submit their curriculum vitae, list of publications and a brief statement of research experience, and arrange to have at least three letters of reference sent separately to:
Michael Thomas Colossal Storage Send FeDrive Mail
Caution - Colossal Storage reserve the right to modify its advisory list, delete and add per company requirements, without notice per the company requirements. No guarantees of employment are implied or stated.
Research and Development Unknowns
What is the optimum ferroelectric ceramic crystal molecule for UV/blue laser diode frequency and quantum energy needed to cause electron movement from valence to conduction band.
What is the necessary field strength to cause electron movement in ferroelectric molecule to cause perovskite dipole switching.
What is the optimum head to media spacing.
What is the minimum and maximum linear or radial velocity of the media to head.
What is the optimum read non destruct laser UV/blue frequency and quantum energy.
What is the angle of the 2nd read laser led.
What are the light/photon characteristics of diffraction, refraction, luminescence, reflection, etc. from/to the ferroelectric ceramic crystal molecule.
What are the characteristic of the photo diode and the mosfet read components.
What is the maximum track densities, 100,000 and higher.
What are the possibilities for complex encrypted multiple bit storage.
Is MOCVD the best way to deposit ferroelectric perovskite molecules on a substrate of glass, metal, ceramic, or plastic.
What type of binder an
Once again, you're being ridundent.
This is child's stuff and not even novel. Mainframes using mag-tape for virtual memory have allowed hot-swapped live processes for something like 20-30 years. Moving the capability to non-volatile hot-swappable main memory would not be hard. You couldn't use the patches as they stand, but I never said you could. You'd have to extend a few concepts first, but it IS just an extension and the method ALREADY exists in other systems. The novelty factor, which I believe would attract attention, is that it's never been done for main memory (only virtual memory) and it's never been done for home computers (only Really Big Iron). Neither of these are big problems, they barely qualify as small problems, but precisely because they have never been tried, you would get a lot of attention.
Honestly, sometimes I feel that 99% of the computing world's problems is a total lack of imagination on using existing methods. This is not the first time I've noted you can use pre-existing technology for more than it was originally designed for. I'm not even unique in that. But invariably, such uses are panned viciously - until they become the norm, at which point it becomes blindingly obvious to even the densest that it's remarkably doable. All that happens is that those who pointed out the possibility in the first place get panned for the next thing they speculate about for precisely the same reason.
Gah. I've been putting up with this for the past 28 years, I dunno why I'm expecting things to be any different now.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Think of it. Microsoft will see it, and want to ship a version of Windows that takes up 500 terabytes of the drive. Then there is the formatting of the drive, so when all is said and done, after formating and the OS, you will only have about 300 terabytes left. Amazingly, though, if he is working on instant access, will this mean the OS will boot up in under a second? Will we need all the ram, as nothing will need to be written to virutal memory?
Mandrake will ship on 50 blue ray discs.
Farcry 3 will take up 4 terabytes, and the 128bit processor upgrade patch will be 400 gigabytes, and another 450 gigabytes for the 128bit exclusive content.
A video driver will now be a gig in size.
Can you imagine the size of a 4 hour long uncompressed 1080p High-Def movie?
Fiber may not be fast enough for us anymore.
JPEG and GIFs will become obsolete as TIFF and RAW and other formats take off. There will be no need to export PSD to other formats.
With this size in drives, Blue-Ray suddenly starts looking to us like floppies are now.
If people are still using MPEG and AVI and JPEG, could you imagine the size of some people's porn collection?
On the plus side, I FINALLY have enough room on the drive to do proper video editing. Seems that no matter how big a drive I get, how many drives I get, I still do not have enough.
http://66.249.93.104/
http://64.233.187.104/
The second one went live, I think. You will see that they still return pretty much the same results, but the first one will have more. I should add that the string "experimental google server" (with quotes) always returns zero results. This has always bugged me, since I figured that someome, somewhere, would have used that combination of words. Maybe not. Maybe it's a googlebomb.
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