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."

Comments

Re:They'd best be careful

[PhoenixLE]

Wow. Just SO wrong. Where did you get this crap? Electron spin state IS detectable, and that isn't anything new. ESR (Electron Spin Resonance) operates much like NMR which observes shifts in the energy states of nuclei when their spin state is altered to align with an induced magnetic field. Electrons are a point charge, but since the charge is rotating a magnetic field is generated that can be operated upon and observed, allowing quantification of the electrons spin state. Flipping the spin state of an electron causing an antimatter explosion or some such? We had better hope not, because we'd already be in a might bit of trouble. I suggest you go grab a general PChem Quantum textbook and read up on the principles of quantum mechanics. Though this 720 degrees of rotation stuff is kinda amusing in a comical fashion :P

Re:Solidisks

[jd]

I was talking strictly non-volatile. If you want to talk about volatile RAM, like DRAM, where you are going to refresh the contents every few nanoseconds, degradation of contents - provided it is slower than your refresh rate - is completely unimportant. In fact, degradation of content is precisely WHY you have to refresh the content. In fact, fast degradation is a GOOD thing for volatile RAM. It means you can change the contents extremely quickly. Completely the opposite requirement of non-volatile storage, where retention is the key consideration.

Volatile RAM also has to remain powered at all times. Again, this is a GOOD thing. Old-fashioned "core" memories could retain data for a hundred years plus, which made rebooting somewhat of a lengthy process. You would not, for example, build a CPU where the internal registers used "core" memory or any other form of non-volatile memory. At least, not unless you were very drunk.

On the other hand, if you wanted to replace a hard drive, DRAM is next to useless. Sure, you can have a stack of NiCad batteries in parallel to keep the memory going, provided you remember to replace/recharge them as needed. Wouldn't help you, though, if you had a short. For mass storage, where the contents absolutely needs to be retained for a long period of time, you absolutely do NOT want to use DRAM.

When you get right down to it, though, if the CPU had a gig or four of register-speed RAM on board, you wouldn't really want DRAM for anything. Main memory is only useful because it's substantially cheaper than register-speed RAM and it wouldn't be trivial to build a processor big enough to hold that much memory. Main memory, for a long time now, has been treated as little more than a cache for virtual memory, where all the real storage is on disk, and as a dumping ground for what memory the processor does have. If CPUs held enough, and/or mass storage was fast enough, main memory would go the way of the dodo. It's a relic that persists only because the alternatives are too limited right now.