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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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!...."
Is that before or after rebate?
No. Thank you.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
When they ship, I'll order 2 of them. They'll be perfect to make a backup of that /dev/random file.
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"
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
I'm sorry, but this is completely wrong. A positron and an electron both have spin + or - 1/2, the difference is in their charge. You can't 'spin it too far' - that doesn't even make sense on a quantum-physical level, unless there have been amazing leaps that I somehow missed in recent years.
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!
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
MP3s?
At that point, one has to ask why bother with compression?
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
This place is starting to have the editorial standards of the National Enquirer...
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.
Oops, I just noticed this at the end:
"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."
I think I was just trolled by this article.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
The direction that cosmic radiation comes from can be identified. If election -> positron conversions happened, we would be seeing 1 MeV xray/gamma radiation coming from everywhere. People aren't dying of radiation sickness in large numbers, therefore rotating an electron 360 degrees doesn't result in its conversion to a positron.
"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
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).
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.
Bah, 100GB. With all his other claims, I'm sure this guy already has the 100Tb network ready at that time. However, a few years from that, you'll not need it any more because you can get his great prediction program, which just will accurately predict whatever traffic you would get on your network, and therefore you can avoid to actually transfer the data.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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.
I hear the makers of the phantom gaming system are going to use this in their product.