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

Eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

2. So my PETABYTES of data don't all go down the tube at once.

At first I was thinking about all the pron I could store on it and the agony of it all being lost at once. Then I realized it might be a bad idea to have porn on a petabyte storage device. They would have to be stored in files and they might be called petafiles. This would suck! All my pron is over 18 (as thier sites say) but i'm not sure if some bible thumping do gooder would belive me if I associated with known petafiles.

Just A Second

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I've already got one of these. It's right between my cold fusion device and my copy of Duke Nukem Forever.

Star Trek?

[77Punker]

"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.

To answer the question

[harmonica]

A 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive?

No, 640 TB should be enough for everyone.

Vaporwate

[rminsk]

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.

Re:A million times?

[grub]

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.

The author was probably using Imperial Petabytes, not Metric Petabytes.

Price

[professorfalcon]

the cost would probably be in the range of $750 each

Is that before or after rebate?

1.2 Petabyte equals

[binkzz]

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.

That's nothing

[climbon321]

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!

Re:That's nothing

[aventius]

Chuck Norris has already invented all of these but is too humble to take any credit.

Re:Predictions of "4-5 years away" never are

[ThomK]

how many times are we promised phenomenal increases in storage, processing power, batteries, etc that are only "4-5 years away"?

117.

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

Solidisks

[jd]

Solid-state "disks" (such as the 1980's "solidisk" system) may be the future, but they're also very much the past too. Genuinely non-volatile solid-state memory date back to the earliest "core" memories, but have taken many forms (eeproms, bubble memory - there are even forms of static RAM that can hold data for significant periods of time with no power).

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.

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.

colosalstorage.com Credibility?

[BigBlockMopar]

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.