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Researchers Achieve Amazing Memory Density
Mr. Fahrenheit writes in with a Wired story on research out of Arizona State, where researchers have "developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years... The new memory technology — programmable metallization cell (PMC) — comes as current storage technologies are starting to reach their physical limits." PMC involves the on-demand creation of copper nano-wire bridges. It's said to promise memories that are 1/10 the cost and 1/1000 the power consumption of conventional Flash memory. Three memory manufacturers have licensed the technology and the first chips are expected on the market in 18 months.
How about speed, durability, mean time before failure, etc.
Togheher with your flying car. No. Really.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Who on earth would ever need more than a terabyte?
The game.
We've all seen this a dozen times before. All "amazing density storage" is vaporware, even if we'll be able to buy it real soon now.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
- how to back it all up
- how to secure it
Most people (end-users) wouldn't recognize a good backup if it jumped up and bit them on the proverbial, and even less would have "good security" (hard encryption, long password that change frequently, etc).Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
"Kozicki says the process is like condensing a crystal from a solution, except that the process is almost infinitely reversible. If the PMC is fed a positive charge, the copper atoms return to their previous free-floating state, and the nanowires disassemble."
I would like to know the exact number of cycles this will take, plus or minus a few million times.
The technology looks like it would eventual deplete the material used for the interconnect. But than again I am not a physicist.
Finally, they will have a viable means to distribute Duke Nuke'm Forever!
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
"researchers have developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years"
Screw consumers - think of the reviewers!
That should give fresh momentum to the "how much is too much?" swag topic taco seems to love so much...heaven forbid we should walk too close to the edge on that one.
In other news - Boston wins series. Yawn...
The problem with how memory is that it gives developers no incentive to optimize code to run it faster/better/smaller other then small speed boosts. 1 TB of storage would be nice, but if it means that I have to download 300 GB for a program or a Linux distribution with the same speed of 1 MB/second it would take forever or say a 7 MB web site. We need to see an increase in Internet speeds at affordable prices first before we go overboard with physical storage.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Security to most users always takes a back to functionality. If security/backup can be done dumbified but effectively and backup *ALL* your "precious" then it's a success story. If not; I'd be willing to back it up and store it in a safe under my bed while sleeping with a gun ableit safety on, hehe.(Just kidding, I'm not allowed to have firearms but I got serious chop-suey-socky skills, really).
FTA: "Kozicki says the process is like condensing a crystal from a solution, except that the process is almost infinitely reversible." Remember that gargoyles episode where like half of australia gets covered in nano crystals? That's what your room looks like after a drive failure.
It's always fun when a 'disruptive technology' comes along and devalues all the research in similar fields. Assuming that this is what it claims to be, I wonder where 'moving parts' storage will be in 5 years?
It may cost 1/10th the cost to make, but I submit that we'll be charged double the current price simply because it's "new and improved." Just look at CDs vs. Tape or VHS vs. DVD.
Now building copper bridges is a whole different kind of animal. It's more akin to chemistry. Reliability is likely to be poor, as impurities and dust bollix things up. Speed and power consumption are not going to be great, as you're moving copper atoms, many thousands of times heavier than electrons.
This device may be more in the running as a disk-drive replacement than as a substitute for flash memory.
On the other hand, having cheap storage on this scale also means that one of the largest barriers to HD-DVD/BluRay piracy will suddenly vaporize--everyone can have more than enough storage for all those pirated movies. Of course, the bandwidth to download them will still remain the bottleneck...
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It would be great if they made it look just like a floppy. I would pull up a command prompt and format it everyday, just so I look like a smarty computer guy to all my coworkers.
And what a great excuse, "Sorry sir, I will get that report to you as soon as this thing formats. Oh, look at the time. See you in the morning."
FAQs are evil.
Cheap? Cool. Large size? even better. Energy efficient? Meh, I'm not in Greenpeace, but sure. And I'm even willing to believe it's reasonably reliable.
But how come nobody's concerned aobut the the IO speed? I wouldn't be too concerned about reading, but if writing/rewriting requires real-time rebuilding of gates, wouldn't it be snail-slow?
The IO of even regular hard drives already becomes a significant factors as drives grow exponentially larger and speed stays the same as always. If this is even slower, it'd become a serious deterrent.
so if the proccess this uses if infinitely reversible, does that mean that the usual maximum number of writes associated with flash memory will be gone? or just increased by a huge factor?
stuff
... my gut says "no". In my experience, announcements of revolutionary technology that are much more than just a few months away from commercialization are typically attempts at funding for research on a proposed project, rather than an actual announcement of an existing viable product.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Bla..bla..bla.....
Lots of cool stuff promised by lots of people (some of whom are cool).
Wake me when I can buy it.
You want someone dead or put away for life you say? M'kay, then just slip a this little sucker loaded with a couple of TB's worth of snuff and kiddie-porn into your targets pocket and call the feds on him.
The technology sounds great, and if they come through with it I am sure it will lead to many innovations. However, am I the only one who feels a little uncomfortable with research done at a state university, funded by the public, and performed by unpaid or low-paid grad students being licensed by "Arizona States business spin off, Axon Technologies"
I know that type of arrangement may be common place today but I sure would like to follow the money trail.
are diskless machines gonna make a come back?
Energy efficiency is not at all arbitrary if it is coming out of a battery.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
We already have all kinds of good encryption.
Assuming this is cheap, you just buy another one to back it up on. (And if it's not cheap, you probably can't afford the first one, anyway.)
The bigger problem is a social engineering one. Someone is going to forget to backup, and someone is going to get their data stolen. But you can't solve these with technology any more than you can cause them with technology.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
A Library of Congress! In your pocket!
At nano scales, physical processes are not necessarily slow...
That is really cool. Sure, rsync has been doing that for years for us geeks, but Apple took the concept and gave it a name and metaphor that I think everyone will understand. The metaphor will still work when they introduce the Apple remote Time Machine service for internet backups. I don't have a Mac, I'm a Linux guy (like to hack on projects), but I can appreciate excellent UI design.
our first 16k systems, our first 12 Megabyte hard disk (external) and the massive full height 80MB one that came along later. Anyone own a SHUGART drive?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Holy cow, that's fantastic. If I could carry my whole DVD collection on my iPod, I would. Not to mention, that dropping the storage cost like that would also make 4K video feasible.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Actual bandwidth WILL NOT be a bottleneck in the near future considering fiber optics. I'm looking foward to this and so are many others like me who patrol the net seas for booty! Arrrgh!
Someone mentioned that it takes an extraordinarily small amount of energy (1 pJ) to flip bits.
Will this be stable in the field? I mean, EMF should be able to elicit those kinds of potentials fairly easily.
five dozen scientific formulas per cubic millimeter of gray matter.
Will they run Linux?
1 day down, 17 months and 30 days to go.
Oh how I look forward to the day I can fit the linux distros of the world on a usb key!
How long would it take to fill a 1TB "Thumb Drive" over USB2? or even USB3?
Some Numbers...
1TB = 1024^4 = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte
USB 2.0 Transfer Rate = 480 Mbit/s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB2#USB_2.0
USB 3.0 Transfer Rate = 4.8 Gbit/s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB2#USB_3.0
1 megabit = 10^6 = 1,000,000 bits which is equal to 125,000 bytes or 125 kilobytes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbit
1 gigabit = 10^9 = 1,000,000,000 bits (which is equal to 125 decimal megabytes or 119.2 mebibytes, as 8 bits equals one byte) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gbit
Some Math...
Time required to transfer 1TB over USB 2.0 @ (480 Mbit/s) is: (1,099,511,627,776 / (480*125,000)) = 18325.19 Seconds = 305.42 Minutes = 5.09 Hours
Time required to transfer 1TB over USB 3.0 @ (4.8 Gbit/s) is: (1,099,511,627,776 / (4.8*125,000,000)) = 1832.52 Seconds = 30.54 Minutes = 0.51 Hours
So,
Even if the USB 3.0 specification meets its proposed data transfer goal, 1 Terabyte would take about 1/2 Hour to transfer.
-I hope USB3 is around the corner SOON, because 5 HOURS over USB2 is a bit too long to wait while transferring 1TB onto a USB2 Thumb Drive!
When would you ever have to transfer a full terabyte at a time? Unless you're doing a really bigass backup to this thing, you probably won't.
And if you are, well that's a hell of a lot faster and more convenient than burning 233 standard DVD-R's (about what it would take with non dual-sided discs) or writing the equivilent tape or network-based backup method. Heck, that beats out most disk-to-disk transfers.
Hey, stick to The Rules. No new, paradigm-changing technologies are allowed to be announced as arriving in less than 5 years.
For that matter, they can't be more than 5 years out either!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's the problem with these technology breakthroughs. I fell bad for blue ray and HD dvd, cause now everyone will have a drive big enough to rip to. That is if the 40 Gig version of this new memory costs more than a blue ray media.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Using "if there were a nuclear holocaust" as a basis of amazement-level in this day and age is downright ridiculous. You must be amazed at everything, from the combustion engine to road engineering, to the point where you're in a constant stupor.
Yes, there have been significant accomplishments and yes, we have stood on the shoulders of giants to get there, but reiterating the obvious fact to revel in primitivism is not admirable in any way whatsoever, and I don't see why you've been modded up for your bewilderment.
Since this probably means that game producers will be able to put their games on flash drives instead of CDs and DVDs, it would be even more convenient than having a backup disk.
That, and they'd be able to shrink down the size of game boxes again, from dvd size to, dare I say it, cigarette pack sized. Your next video game could be dispensed by a vending machine.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
I hate to see were you have your porn implanted.
I remember back in the day finding a pile (I mean like 300) of computers outside the school and going nuts and I quickly filled the family car several times. ANYWAY, I dreamed of networking all of the machines and even bragged to my friends about the possibility I would have cumulitively 100+ gig of storage after consolidating. That was 98'. Who knew 9 years later I'd have a 1TB external drive I could carry around with me with a much lower elec bill. That is how I appreciate it...
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Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that a single write takes 100ms.
All you have to do is thread it. You can't do this with normal hard drives, short of RAID. But, like a well-designed flash array, you can pretty much parallize any write you want.
Of course, it means that the filesystem would have to know to do this, but I don't see it really having any serious implications on performance. If it functions as a solid-state device, then I'd assume it could theoretically perform better, actually.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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So he found a good use for tin whiskers? Otherwise, I can see how tin contamination will kill of his memory cells.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
In the memory field the price will be just barely enough to reap profit and not a cent more. When it comes to semiconductors, MEMS, and other such devices, the amount of profit made on each unit when produced for mass consumption is amazingly small. The pressure and competition to build it smaller and cheaper leaves very little time for price gouging. If you want to see market forces working at their finest, just take a look at the semiconductor industry. Competition is absolutely brutal and prices fall at breathtaking speeds.
Hell, just ponder how much a flash drive is these days. I bought my first flash drive in 2004 or 2005. It was a little 32mb one that cost me something like $50. Just the other day I got a frigging two 2gb flash drives for $30.
You might get gouged in price for your iPhone, PS4, or whatever, but it wont be because they had to pay an arm and a leg for the memory. Memory prices go in only one direction, and they do it very rapidly.
This sounds suspiciously like "whiskers".
These little puppies were first discovered by accident back when AT&T was "The Phone Company". If I've got this right: Bell Labs had come up with a new alloy for terminal blocks that they thought would have some advantages. Western Electric made some up and the Bell Systems deployed them.
Some time later they started running into trouble. Linemen would try to turn the nut and it wouldn't turn. So they cut some out and sent 'em in for analysis.
These long, thin, crystals of metal had grown through the boundary of the thread, welding the nuts onto the bolts. They were extremely pure and very strong - in the general neighborhood of the theoretical strength of the material, when things fabricated by normal processes fell short by a "factor of many" (more than one power of ten).
They cristened them "whiskers". I'm not aware of anything that came of that at the time.
But when the early satellites were going up (back when the very early printed circuits were the cutting edge of hi-tech), whiskers showed up again - growing between the lines of the printed circuit board exposed to vacuum and zero g, shorting things out. This is why early US satellites (heavily miniaturized to go on the small boosters) tended to flake out while early Russian stuff (big discrete components on terminal strips lifted by their big boosters) kept working - and why that reversed later, when the US had the problem solved and the Russians started miniaturizing and had to go through the same learning curve.
Once they figured out what was happening and came up with an alloy that didn't whisker, they played around for a bit with self-healing printed circuit boards. These had conductors of a whiskering alloy with a plating of non-whiskering stuff. Idea was that if a trace broke due to vibration during launch, the exposed core would whisker across the gap and make things run again (until it whiskered over to another wire and shorted things out.) During that time they also played with self-healing aluminized mylar capacitors, designed so that if the mylar developed a hole the cap would discharge through the hole, vaporize the aluminum around the hole, and things would then go back to normal operation.
I'm not sure that any of this actually worked out.
If these ARE whiskers-on-demand as storage elements, it's nice to see whiskers actually do something useful. B-)
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You can get a 2G thumb drive today for $25, or $12.50 per Gig. A 1T thumb drive at $1.25 a G would therefore cost $1,250. That is a pretty expensive gadget to hang off the side of your laptop. What is more, I bet that they aren't using the $12.50 a Gig price when they say it is a tenth the price of current flash technology. It wouldn't surprise me to see a Tb introduced at something closer to $2,500. But prices will come down with time, and it is certainly a good start.
Remember young one, there was once a time, in ages long past, that hard disks and flash were wild dreams, even perhaps vaporware.
These took ages too develop to maturity as well, and many techs that once were introduced just fizzled away.
Too often we make the mistake of thinking things should be happening now. IT moves fast, but not all that fast. How long does it take for MS to come up with a new version of their software? Let alone actually do the things they once promised?
Hardware is the same, we see something intresting and want it now. Doesn't work like that, and then when it finally arrives, we are so used to it already that we just go "meh".
We got harddrives of HALF A TERRABYTE being the most effective money/gigabyte buy right now. Think about that for a second. How many years do you have to go back when you would have had to stuff a server full of hardware to get that kind of storage you can now find in basic desktops?
How many years ago is it that people were excited about flash storage of 32 megabytes that was slow as hell?
All these advances are possible because of those stories like these you read about, and then forgot when the actuall technology arrives that uses them.
Offcourse we get a lot of vapor, hologram storage seems to be one, but a lot of the stuff does eventually, slowly emerge. Take e-paper. Been around for years, but there are now actuall products out there that use it. By the time it will become widely available it won't be worthy of a headline anymore, and slashdot will be reporting on the next hot thing that might one day be.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
"By the time it will become widely available it won't be worthy of a headline anymore, and slashdot will be reporting on the next hot thing that might one day be."
Geeks get dates!
I wonder what this means for the free money making industry. At the moment 'compensation' is calculated at 25 EUR for each portable music player and 0.15 EUR/GB for a harddisk recorder.
Of course, but until a product is actually announced with a release date, this is just the storage technology of the week.
Tag storagetechoftheweek
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Does the headline strike anyone else as a headline that could easily be used over and over and over, far into the future? I mean, I'd imagine that such-and-such years ago, a megabyte RAM stick was "amazing memory density."
About 3 to 5 years after they announce it's to be released "reall soon".
5 years, 10 years, or never.
I think MS is, perhaps, the worst possible company you want to draw examples from on IT done right. This isn't because MS is specifically bad technologically. It's because they have a killer marketing department (ie, their marketing department is full of idiots who promise the impossible (because it'll boost sales) without any real knowledge of what is possible, probable, or really understanding what is being worked on*). Or was that your point?
*If Microsoft sold adult products, someone in marketing would overhear someone in the development department talking about some software sucking and would soon announce "Microsoft Blowjob.NET".
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
hologram storage
Just not exactly mainstream.
Capacity 300GB to 1.6TB (2010), media from $180 list price, drive at 18,000$.
And it is used.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
By then you'll be downloading in HD Video 360 degree IMAX. Just imagine, you'll be surrounded by the bitches!
johnny's wet dream
Just not exactly mainstream
You can find just about any storage technology that has ever existed in use in someone's current product, right now. There is nothing out there that has no niche market use.
Or as it was put from a digg story some time ago:
1 GB 20 years ago, vs 1 GB now
If you think about it, nowadays you buy 16 GB memory in a 43x36x5mm card whereas 10 years ago you could only get at most 1 GB in a bigfoot hard disk...
This technology does look promising!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
why do assholes like you come around slashdot? is it because no one else will have you or is this the only place where you can use a big vocabulary with no real substance in what you say and still feel respectable?
Granted this does seem like a technology of whimsical smoke. However I think it is one of many very high density solutions that are just on the horizon. And helps define some of the brighter and scarier aspects of this technology.
:) Some how some way.
Today it's estimated that given almost any city, you can expect in a day to be viewed by hundreds if not thousands of cameras. Many of these cameras feed into security suites to be recorded just in case something happens and evidence is needed etc.
Here we have a very high density, extremely low power, probably non-volatile mode memory device. It would make dependable suspect tracking and recording attractively small. Spy devices need to be small and innocuous.
Then there is the question of usability as dependable storage. Would it be as dependable as current hard drives? If it was, why in the world would we keep making hard drives if these could take their place? So we get a boon for storage and the HD industry does a big belly flop because they are making huge, noisy, heat generating, power sucking monsters.
Yeah with every good there is always a bad.
Just some thoughts.
Happy Holloween.
Flash memory is already pretty low-power, at 1/1000th the power of it, that might actually produce net energy gain :). Seriously, at 1/10th the cost
Then I'll be able to power it with those 75% efficient and 1/10th the cost solar cells that are supposed to be coming out "in 18 months".
Achieve Amazing Memory Density
My ex-wife used to say the same thing about me...
You can find just about any storage technology that has ever existed in use in someone's current product, right now.
Just thought that vapor (as OP said) is less.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I do want to hear about them, so kindly start using the singular pronoun, because you only speak for you.
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Shut up, you dumb nigger.