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"Magnetic Tornadoes" Could Offer New Data Storage Tech
coondoggie writes to tell us about the latest technique researchers are investigating as a possible means to store data, magnetic tornadoes. "Conventional computer memories store data in "bits" that consist of two magnetic elements that record data in binary form. When these elements are magnetized in the same direction, the computer reads the bit as a '0'; when magnetized in opposite directions, the bit represents a '1,' researchers stated. According to scientists, a vortex forms spontaneously — one vortex per disk — in a small magnetic disk when the disk's diameter falls below a certain limit. Although the vortex does not whirl about like a meteorological tornado, the atoms in the material do orient themselves so that their magnetic states, or 'moments,' point either clockwise or counterclockwise around the disk's surface. At the center of the disk, the density of this rotation causes the polarity of the vortex core to point either up out of the disk or down like a tornado's funnel, researchers stated. Because the vortices that form on the disks contain two independently controllable and accessible magnetic parameters, they could form the basis for quaternary bits that would contain data written as a 0, 1, 2, or 3."
How do we know these magnetic tornadoes won't grow and destroy our trailer parks?????
Logic just became _extra_ fuzzy.
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.
When will they take over the world? I have to prepare my disembodied head.
I suppose you'll get some kind of increase in data storage this way, but wont read/write times be longer because you'll need to deal with translations between quaternary and binary?
I don't see any uses of this if the bits are not in binary, we are too entrenched to write all new code that changes all of the math that has already been worked out.
Stay tuned for new sig...
Is a "quaternary bit" a "quaternary binary digit"? Doesn't make sense. I think you're after a "quaternary digit", or "quit".
The future is in crystals!!!
So I guess now we can call Malware writers "Storm Chasers".
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
No, you can read it like two bits at once. Those bits would be actually separate channels for separate binary physical states, not one quaternary state.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Data storage increase is the first thought I had. But if solid state drives win the drive war, at least at the consumer level, it may be irrelevant. It's not like your WD Caviar will magically harness the power of quarternarian tornadoes and jump from 100GB to [something] TB. Or more. I think it may require more than just a firmware update.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
yo dawg, heard you like bits... so we put some bits in your bits so you could read bits while you read bits
I was really confused for about 5 minutes.
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but wont read/write times be longer because you'll need to deal with translations between quaternary and binary?
No, in fact an advancement such as this would halve the read/write times since twice as much information is read/write in each operation.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
I read an article about Information Theory a long, long time ago (which is probably why I can't Google it) wherein the authors demonstrated that the most efficient means of storing information would be by using an alphabet that had e (2.71828183) letters.
It was pretty interesting and has been stuck in my head. In any event, they surmised further that the closest we could get would be if we came up with some sort of trinary alphabet. They also opined that we were damned lucky to have binary as it's the next-most-efficient alphabet.
Depending on the actual tech, I'm imagining a system where the magnetics are laid down with a rotating magnetic field rather than a rotating disk.
If possible, this would lead to magnetic disks without moving parts.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Quote: Conventional computer memories store data in "bits" that consist of two magnetic elements that record data in binary form. When these elements are magnetized in the same direction, the computer reads the bit as a "0"; when magnetized in opposite directions, the bit represents a "1," researchers stated.
I didn't read TFA, but 'conventional' method looks like a way of storing 4 states in one memory cell...
Keep on researching the wheel
Why didn't I think of that? Tornadoes, in retrospect, seem like the PERFECT place to put my ordered data.
This sounds a lot like magnetic bubble memory that intel, fujitsu, IMB and TI made in the 1980s.
That too had multiple states per "bubble". However the higher-order bubbles were generally not used. The reason was, it was hard enough keeping the single bit (zeroth order mode) bubbles stable at high circulation and high density.
Since here the domains are fixed and the disk moves it might be easier to use higher order magnetic domain modes.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This brings a whole new meaning to the term...
First they have to be big enough to have a cow, man.
I assume that this will be in commercial products in "5-10 years"?
According to scientists, a vortex forms spontaneously - one vortex per disk - in a small magnetic disk when the disk's diameter falls below a certain limit.
So my 750GB drive is now 750GB plus one. Big deal!
Am I missing something?
you just use one of the magnetic mirrors (slashdot a few days ago) that creates a monopole field. The tornadoes will be repelled by the induced image monopoles.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Good question. Truthfully, even though I read the post several times, I still don't understand how it works. On the other hand, I can't wait to market tornado technology!
Well Star Trek already measured everything in quads... so yeah. Truth in television! Also Voyager was very fond of "Gigaquads".
Their is an apocryphal story that the soviets invested heavily in ternary logic and it was physically to hard to implement that it set them back a decade.
At the time, most memory was static memory which draws a current even in the quiescent state. it's easy to think about binary currents, they go one way or the other. What's a trinary current?
Much much later on memory went to charge storage (dynamic memory). This only drew current during switching but none when it was quiescent.
This memory stored levels of charge. You could imaging this might be much easier to implement multiple bits. However, then you would have had to have some way of modulating the amount of charge delivered instead of just opening a gate and letting the capacitor fully charge. In most cases the obvious idea of reverse polarizing the capacitor would make no sense from the point of view of the transitors unidirectionality.
so trinary logic never made any hardware sense.
in the physical world where we have X and Y and sometimes Z, all the modes tend to be multiples of 2 naturally (+/-x +/-y +/i z).
trinary logic makes little practical sense.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You might want to go look up the differences between MLC and SLC Flash.
It's just bit packing. For example (and ignoring many low level details*) your 512-byte sector would be stored in 2048 hardware bit buckets instead of 4096 individual storage quanta.
* For purposes of illustration and ignoring the smart little tricks of hardware reality.
Building a better backup.
Zettabyte Storage
Magnetic tomatoes. Heh.
I don't think that just calling the well known spin-vortices lurid "magnetic tornados" make this a new idea. Gimme one penny for every magnetic or two level or ... system that physicist (I am one of them ...) proposed to be a candidate for groundbreaking new storage systems and I'd be a rich man.
At least to my knowledge these spin-vortices are hard to control and often appear as an unwanted effect in domain wall based storage devices in developmen, like IBMs race track RAM.
We'll see if we hear more of that idea, but the silly name "magnetic tornados" makes me skeptical that this is just getting public attention for getting research grants.
quaternary bits that would contain data written as a 0, 1, 2, or 3
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This would open the door for double density binary storage per magnetic bit as well as adding ternary/quaternary capability.
a 0 on top of a 0 could be 0, a 0 on top of 1 could be 1, a 1 on top of 0 could be 2, and a 1 on top of 1 could be 3.
And ternary/quaternary data would be the usual one bit per particle.
That's just amazing flexibility...
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Magic is rather unnecessary. A multi-terabyte Caviar already exists.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=576
Sorry, I read "your WD Caviar" as "a WD Caviar".
For anyone confused about what ternary and quaternary states are, here's a paper on a ternary machine... There actually was a couple of ternary computers built but they never left the university stage...
http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm
With this storage it would become more practical to build ternary machines which greatly simplify computing.
The ramifications for artificial intelligence are astounding... Think of the number of transistors required to be reduced by a factor of 7, and look at what we could do with current chip manufacturing methods, and you can see the advantages of ternary design over binary. The power requirements are also sharply reduced.
It's pretty crazy... Check out the references at the bottom of the link. One is in English, the other is in Russian.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Western Digital has been harnessing the power of data black holes for years...
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Ok, so I know that a magnetic disc around 100-200nm in diameter will have a vortex domain structure (actually - I don't magnetic nano-rings tend to form onion states, but we'll leave that one for now). I know I can set the vortex state by hitting it with a high intensity laser circularly polarised laser pulse and apply a small +-z magnetic field to set the in/out state. But reading it needs some fancy focussed magneto-optical kerr effect kit and a lot of patience and re-writing the data is tricky - you have to de-magnetise the nano-disc and start over.
Seems a lot of effort for only a factor two increase and a technology that still requires moving parts to move the data element and read head into alignment.
+5 Informative on why lowly techs leave the actual tech and become PHB's.
"I don' wanna hear the incomprehensible crap. I'll be in my 2 hour marketing meeting wondering if we can strike deals with Frank Baum's estate."
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actually.. if you go from binary, to quantary values, a 1GB binary disk would become a 1 exabyte disk.
Defective Logic
You realize that some of those fancy SSD Flash drives use "MLC" flash. Multi-Level Cell's. That means they store more than 1 bit per cell with 4 voltage levels encoding two bits. Different charge levels are implemented by using different current and/or time parameters when charging the gate.
There is work on using 8 voltages to encode 3 bits to further improve the data density.
Gives a whole new meaning to bit storms.
Aunt E&M! Aunt E&M! There's no place like Ohm!
So I'm guessing the strength of these magnetic gales would be measured in Henries? ... I could go on...
What if one of the 4 slots is deliberately miscoded? Do I feel some beautiful encryption coming on?
You read the quad as a holistic unit. If you read it clockwise it comes out one way and if you read it counterclockwise it comes out another, with the same hard data stored.
It's Kurt Godel's Next Generation Dream.
Remember the old trick of chaining two registers in the 6502 days? If you chain two of these Qritters together, can we get a Klein twist?
Sorry, I'm feeling there's like a terabyte of storage AND processing instructions buried in here.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
And what if we scare robots into killing all the humans? Doesn't anyone remember how scared Bender was when he saw a 2 amidst all those 0s and 1s in that nightmare?
With current hard disks if your drive is fubar, you have some chance of recovery of data. What happens if the disk stops on these drives and the magnetic vortex disappears?
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
The bits all go to four. Look, right across the board, four, four, four and...
Oh, I see. And most bits go up to two?
Exactly.
Does that mean it's bigger? Is it any bigger?
Well, it's two bigger, isn't it? It's not two. You see, most geeks, you know, will be running at two. You're on two here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on two on your chips. Where can you go from there? Where?
I don't know.
Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Put it up to four.
Four. Exactly. Two bigger.
Why don't you just use twos and have twice as many twos and make it just as big?
[pause] These go to four.
err, no. this technology would allow 2 bits to be stored in the place of 1 bit, doubling capacity.
So your 1GB disk would become a 2GB disk, with extra expensive funky read heads.
Far from being fuzzy logic, as some posters suggested above, this is more of the same, solid state computer.
I want wave forms. I don't want to have to do tons of calculus, in fact, calculus is the opposite of what I want, a lot of the time. What I want is an event-driven wave form simulator. There are millions of applications for such a beast, from neural nets to physics simulations.
I know what curves I want, mostly, it's combining them together that's tough. I want my computer to simulate the curves in real-time, allow me to add/multiply them together, and tell me when they reach a threshold.
Instead, I have to work out the time variable backwards, I have to figure out when the racket hits the ball, or when the pinball hits the flag.
I realize a hard drive isn't the place to store analog data, but some posters mentioned fuzzy logic, earlier, which of course this is not. That's a common misconception, though, I've found, even among some programmers, until you question them about it and they say, "duh."
I want the real thing.
After implementation, my drive stores 4.294.967.296.008 bits. Happy day!
Guess i dont have to clean up my desk anymore. I'll just buy one of these magnetic tornadoes, and let it suck up every post-it and paperclip. Thats what i call physical storage...
err, no, that would be quadrupling. admitting that the technology allow for comparable bit density.