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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.
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.
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?
I don't think the poster was referring to the simple/slow flash technology of our usb fobs.
There's a whole other side to flash technology where large scale, ultra high-speed drives are being made of some very cool flash technology.
Enhancing that so that storage capacities approximate today's largest hard drives, with the speeds that these bad ass flash components can provide, would be great.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
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!
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.
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
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)
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.
This place is starting to have the editorial standards of the National Enquirer...
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..."
runs at roughly 10Mhz (defined by the protagonist as "decisions per second").
Perhaps that's what he meant, but if you were to take this as actual decisions based on weighing any number of factors, you could be talking about a *lot* of clock cycles per decision.
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.