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A 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the peta-unavailable-for-comment dept.

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."

8 of 431 comments (clear)

  1. Eh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:Eh? by Trejkaz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You could always have a RAID-6 array of petabyte-sized hard drives, couldn't you?

      --
      Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
  2. Backups, anybody? by Fx.Dr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sounds like 1.2 Petabytes of hurt if and when that thing bytes the dust.

  3. Vaporwate by rminsk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Believe it when it ships by jmorris42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  5. Predictions of "4-5 years away" never are by diamondsw · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  6. You've got to be kidding me! by birge · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Do the editors here have ANY self-respect left? This guy is so clearly a kook and charlatan that I can't believe there is anybody who fell for his psuedo-scientific babble. There's absolutely nothing credible about the website, and none of the "science" makes much sense. You can't get electron spins to stay in a pure state in a molecule. If you could, quantum computing wouldn't be so hard. There's really no point in addressing why it won't work, since it doesn't make any sense, anyway. It's just a bunch of gibberish, talk about "Bohr Atomic Postulate" (whatever that is) and how optically excited electrons will stay in place until readout by another light (not true), blah blah blah. The guy is fucking insane.

    This place is starting to have the editorial standards of the National Enquirer...

  7. the quality of Snake Oil is really taking a dive by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 4, Insightful
    This article is pure balderdash. Even lowly me, with just one semester of quantum mechanics can see it's all pure hokum. Ah, for the days when you could get past the first sentence without realizing it was all fairy dust!

    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.