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12.8 Petabytes, You Say?
MadUndergrad writes "Dr. Jonathan Spanier from Drexel University has come up with a novel way to greatly increase data storage density: water. Specifically, they propose using hydroxyl ions to stabilize minute ferroelectric wires. These wires could be many times smaller than what is possible today, enabling data densities in the neighborhood of 12-13 PB per cubic centimeter. While there are still many problems to be resolved before drives using these can be manufactured this technology does seem promising. For one thing, it would be non-volatile, but could apparently be made to act as RAM. The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapor."
To me this idea sounds a little wet.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I did not read the article, but I would imagine the usage would be limited by temperature ranges, for that matter, even simple exposure of the components.
Imagine a device with this technology submitted to freezing temperatures?
It'd be pretty annoying if you came back from a run/heavy night's drinking (delete as suits you) and accidentally drank the backup of all your MP3s and pr0n to rehydrate you...
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I can't believe they would be so irresponsible as to use dihydrogen monoxide for data storage. That stuff is deadly!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapor.
Until the heat sink fails.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
"The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapor."
Um... the fact that this is coming from a university suggests to ME that it might be highly impractical, but of some academic interest.
I mean, "university" may rank above "wacky fly-by-night startup looking to fleece investors" on the ol' Trust-o-meter, but the fact that a few academics are studying something certainly doesn't mean it's even potentially viable as a commercial product.
What if I accidentially go over capacity -- I don't want it to overflow and fry my motherboard!
the water will have to be de-mineralized to eliminate conductivity.
whats left is oxygen and hydrogen, with the electricity in the wires running through the wires be strong enough to create electrolysis?
thats not what i'd call non-volatile.
Enjoy Every Sandwich
Prof. Jonathan Spanier is in Materials Engineering, so I would bet this is a lab demonstration of an effect that might be developed into a technology, not something likely to appear on store shelves in a year or two. Still, it is an important first step in that direction.
Sorry to be so cynical, but why do you put more merit behind something from a University? They're competing for research dollars and don't actually have to produce anything that works in the field or that they'll have to support for many years. In much the same way that corporations extend/enhance the truth to attract customers, Universities extend/enhance the truth to attract grants.
Despite what my tone may reflect, I'm very curious to your thought process.
Not vaporware because it's from university?
...
Right, because nobody exaggerates or gins up evidence to write a thesis
"The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapor."
You haven't attended university on our planet, have you?
After drinking out of 'a glass of water and wire three-billionths of a meter wide'
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Best tasting mineral water I've ever had! Has a funny aftertaste though...
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Like Pons & Fleishman's cold fusion? Like the recent Korean cloning fiasco? Like the forestry research papers that were pulled because of political and corporate pressure? Like so many others that have been in the recent news?
Problem is that scientists and researchers can be corrupted by fame, fortune or pressure just like other humans.
I'm not saying that this technology is bogus - I know nothing about the technology or the people involved. But the fact that it comes from a university doesn't offer any special guarantees in my book.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Imagine an iPod playing music for 100 millennia without repeating a single song
Thats great until during that 100 millenia you encounter the next Ice Age, it freezes stopping its data transfer to only playing one song, "I Got You Babe" by Sonny & Cher
- for eternity.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Man...there's so much wrong with this article.
/. become Popular Science?
The RAM/NVRAM thing for one... RAM is for speed; NVRAM (including disk drives with random-access method drivers) is for persistent storage. There's no reason to believe that the two won't be the same, but there's also no information given here showing that this stuff is as fast as any RAM.
Thermodynamics for another.
The scaling of density figures ignoring spacing elements.
When did
It sounds like the magnetic core memory of the old days.
Sweet Jesus, is this article's sole purpose to be fodder for bad vaporware jokes?
Start cranking 'em out, folks.
---------------------------
called that spreadsheet!!
.xls files containing "2006 budget"
User: Hey Clippy search for
Clippy: I see, you want me to spend the rest of eternity searching 13 petabytes for your stupid spreadsheet??! I quit!! User: This maybe the first effective way to get rid of that little twerp.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapor.
<rant>i don't think the poster has worked with many universities. my experience with using them as subs on r & d projects has been highly mixed — occasionally, you'll find a group that just rocks. the problem is that the remaining 7-9 out of 10 times, you end up just replacing the components that the university was supposed to deliver because they either (a) failed to deliver anything at all (not uncommon) or (b) delivered code that was so horrendously broken that it was less effort to redo their pieces than to shepherd them through the process of fixing things.</rant>
before i'm flamed to death: please note that i didn't say all universities suck (and in particularly, i didn't imply that your university sucks).
Does this mean that the operating temp range will be 32F - 212F (0C-100C)?
I would have said, If this is vaporware I'd be steamed...
I suppose this will give a whole new meaning to the term "The computer froze up"!
Will we litterally need a bit bucket for overflow?
I better stop now.
"She Bangs" as sung by William Hung. I suppose better that than say, the greatest hit's of ABBA.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Without commenting on the competence of the researcher, whoever wrote the press release doesn't have the first idea what they're talking about.
"Ferroelectric materials possess spontaneous and reversible electric dipole moments. These dipole moments are times when the material gains a charge, in this case an electric one. For example, the Earth's magnetic field generates a dipole moment that causes compasses to face north"
First sentence is correct. Second sentence is baloney. A dipole moment is not anything to do with time, and an electric dipole moment does not mean a material gains a net charge, although it might correspond to a charge developing on a certain surface. Third sentence: the dipole moments associated with the earth's magnetization are nothing to do with the dipole moments in a ferroelectric material. The former are the result of intrinsic magnetic moments in atoms, the latter the result of differing charge distributions in materials. Similar names, completely different things.
Here is the exact text:
Btw... I find it creepy that googling this returned six results.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
And what's the density of current storage? While it has a lot of square centimeters, current coatings are rather thin. What would a cubic centimeter of current magnetic disc storage store?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yay for Anime fans !
It has become too difficult to cope with all these hoards of anime - no hard disks ever big enough, no cd writer fast enough -
Cavalry on the way it seems. We can speed up 'acquisition' of anime eh ?
Read radical news here
They have returned core dump to its original meaning! Now THAT is what I call good science!
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The problem has never been the transfer rate between two nodes. The problem has always been with increasing the capacity of whatever filter (lexical, physical, virtual, layered or parsed) that interprets the information.
Much like brains. We certainly get all the info, but that doesn't make everyone smart. The capacity to process information is what counts, the rest is irrelevant.
It brings a whole new meaning to: "Awe-Man my computer froze again..."
Collector's Edition
that is a very valid point, i work in a nanotech lab. we are working on a project invoving CNTs carbon nanotubes) electrified in water. because of nanotube unique properties, any electrical field is greatly amplified. the small surface area of the nanotubes creates areas of extremely high voltage that can easily cause electrolysis.
A robot's ability to speak of Nazis grows by a factor of 2 every 18 months. -roman_mir
...But for some reason when I plugged it in my computer started shooting sparks out of the USB port.
What did I do wrong?
The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapor.
I was going to write just how incorrect this statement is, but after reading previoius comments, I feel I need to defend academic research instead of bash it.
The reason why academic research is not likely to pump out an actual product is because it is not the goal of academic research to create a commercially viable project. The goal is usually to explore the basic underpinnings of something of interest, in this case the possibility of hydroxyl ions to stabilize minute ferroelectric wires. Corporations come along later and add engineering to those principles and produce the products we use.
Those who are saying that academic researchers are con men in search of funding are overstating their case. There are examples of cheating and overstating cases in academic research but they are rare. There are also examples of corporations doing basic research, but they are becoming more rare, too. Bell Labs has all but disappeared, IBM hasn't won my Nobels lately.
Academic research does what it does very very well and quite cheaply (see how much a grad student makes compared to well, anything, really). Corporatations do their research well, too. Just don't confuse the two.
Jack
If you happen to RTFA you'll find that...
the editor took a lot of "artistic liberty" in calling it water. They are actually using hydroxyl (OH) ions. Freezing won't be an issue at all here. It wouldn't surprise me if it ends up working at whatever temperature range the read/write transistors can handle.
Large arrays of nano wires seems very feasible. I'm crossing my fingers.
"We think people rightly feel that once they buy something, it stays bought," --Suw Charman, Open Rights Grp
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
19 years ago I was using 320kb floppy disks with no hardrive, now my computer have A 300 GB HD, that's 983,000 times that capacity so, I'm ready for embrace my liquid petabytes in a couple of years, don't you folks? PD I need a drink
Now we only need a task that requires such capacity!
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Task in hand I sugguest a Life Recorder.
If such a storage device could be made, It could be possible
to store video, audio and even life signs etc in high quality
for the life of a person.
Imagine a personal blackbox for security people etc.
Just a thought.
I think that the changing structure of water when its frozen (expanded) might fuctz your data ;)
But for me this idea doesn't hold water.
So if you don't want to lose the contents of your RAM I guess you just stick it in the freezer?
Do I see on the horizon a new implementation of PERL's freeze() and thaw() ??
Meh - maybe in PERL 6...
Can I hack one into my Tivo? I hate it when i miss The Simpsons.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
When I saw 12.8 Petabytes I was hoping those were the stats of some new under 99$ SATA Hard Drive. Ah well, I can dare to dream!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
or this is the first product that becomes vaporware after its implementation.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Suddenly, all my data are being vaporized awaaay. This, if something, is vaporware :-)
Who is John Galt?
Second serious reply to my post, so I guess I have to say it: Dihydrogen Monoxide is WATER. The joke is that if you make something sound scary enough, in vague enough terms, people will believe it's a threat. I thought everyone here would get the joke, but apparently not.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Porn?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The Cubic Centimeters are the real secret to high density storage!
They just give you lots of little boxes to pour your data into. When you fill up about 10 of 'em, you just slap some duck tape on them, scribble a half-ass lable with a tiny magic marker, pack it into your Tonka truck with about 10 others, and push it to the other side of the data center. I call this last part the Tonka Transport Layer (TTL), and it offers the highest transfer rates in the history of networking!
The RFC requires that you make 'VROOM! VROOM!' noises and smash it into at least one cow-orker's foot along the way. My 5 year old has already mastered this technology.
Disk surfaces are measured in area, not volume...so if you were to plate that out in a thin layer...how much area/petabyte?
This doesn't address the problem of access, but mere layout. How many cc's of whatever the storage material is does a current high capacity disk contain? I'd wager not many. The desire is generally for as thin a layer as possible to reduce the size of the magnetic domains. Disks used to be metal, but now they're glass (lagely) because of this.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Any of you Petaphiles have a picture of how this is supposed to work?
..."The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapor"...
Drexel isn't exactly a technological powerhouse. This is like the next breakthrough coming out of Riverside State University. I won't hold my breath. This "water" stuff their talking about is probably vapor.
Have you ever seen Groundhog Day?
Yes, and it is a grand spectacle of human superstition well worth driving all the way up to Punxsutawney, PA.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Wires running through water. Electricity runs through wires. Wires get hot. Wires heat water. Water turns to steam. This is definately vapor ware. ;-)
Bear in mind that Drexel is a very market-driven, finance-oriented university with a president who has stated "Make no mistake, higher education is a business."
Perhaps they are looking for some PR, eh?
laugh hard, it's a long way to the bank
to the term "memory leak."
Jonathan E.: So the computer misplaced some information?
Librarian: The entire of the 13th century.
(This is cut and paste directly from the imdb.com, so I'm not responsible for the grammer of the quote.)
I hate sigs (especially yours which is a waste of my bandwidth)
The fact that this is coming out of a university makes me think that this won't be vapor, but in fact, toilet paper. Looks great on a publication list though.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
AEON FLUX last night?
so durring a drought would people flock to data stoage centers?
Start defraging this disk when your child is born and it will be ready when they go to college!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hope they keep the temp under 212F - or it'll all be vapor
antipaucity
640 mL of water ought to be enough for anybody.
Note: I know the Bill Gates quote is fake.
Support for the research at Drexel is from the Army Research Office and at Harvard and at Penn from the National Science Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Dreyfus Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the Center for Piezoelectric Design.
I guess if it really does give 12 petabytes, it will be restricted to classified army usage *only*...
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Vaporware and Petabyte would be nice names for a diner that serves a lot of beans.
With ethics and morals like that it's no wonder that American corporations are pocketing BILLIONS in excess oil profits during times of scarcity, while defunding retirement accounts and abandoning health insurance programs
The goverment takes a nice chunk off of the top of gas prices too, why can't they seem to save the money instead of spend it.
Why is it that the people and corporations smart enough to make more than they spend are evil and greedy, and that nobody seems to complain when corporations and goverments spend more then they make?
I do not mean to imply that corporations can't be too greedy for their own good, but that in capitalism you are supposed to act in your own self interest and aquiring more money then you spend is in your own self interest.
Wrong. Water is not an ionic compound, so it not be called "hydrogen hydroxide" or "hydrogen oxide" or "hydroxic acid". Molecular compounds (i.e. nonmetals) are named using the numerical prefix system, so dihydrogen monoxide is correct, just as ammonia would be nitrogen trihydride, and methane would be carbon tetrahydride.
8 years ago Michael Thomas patented a read write head for 40,000 Terabits cu.cm. using ferroelectrics on a 2d / 3d 3.5 optical disk drive. UV Photon induced electric field poling of a ferroelectric molecule called an optical / molecular / atomic switch.
http://www.colossalstorage.net/
The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapor."
Yeah, if this effort ended up in failure, I'd be steamed too.
Even if it were possible to turn this technology into a commercial venture, I don't think it would be allowed to see the light of day. The article tempts the reader to imagine the following products:In reality, if someone brought a product like this to market in the next 10 years, it would turn the computing industry on its head, and not in a good way. The big players (IBM, HP, etc) would see billions slashed from their revenue and entire divisions would die out. Companies like EMC would collapse within a year. Millions would face unemployment as the storage market we know today evaporated and people in related industries took the hit.
Never mind the money lost, the social consequences to products like this would be devastating to a lot of people.
Now we'll have a place to put our Petafiles!
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Turn up the power, and you'd have REAL vapourware! ---- Everything must change, nothing stays the same.