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"Colossal Magnetic Effect" Could Lead To Another Breakthrough In Storage Tech
Bryant writes "Scientists with the Carnegie Institution for Science have discovered what could bring yet another massive advance in memory and storage. The discovery, a magnetoresistence literally 'up to 1000 times more powerful' than the Giant Magnetoresistence Effect discovered roughly 20 years ago, which led to one of the major breakthroughs in memory, seems to be a result of high-pressure interactions between Manganites. Manganites aren't new to this game; MRAM uses Manganite layers to achieve the Magnetic Tunnel Effect needed to keep the state of memory stable. Applying significant amounts of pressure to known tech-useful materials isn't a new trick; you might recall the recent breakthrough with Europium superconductivity thanks to similar high-pressure antics."
This discovery seems to still be in the very preliminary stages. It is premature to conclude that this will lead to substantial improvements. Putting things under high pressure is difficult and keeping them under high pressure is really hard (although from my minimal physics understanding it looks like this could be used to assist in low pressure situations also).
One thing is certain. If this does lead to improvement in memory we'll have a few months of people asking whatever they could do with all that memory. And then a few years after they'll complain that it isn't enough.
The problem isn't storage its speed. Really with 1TB of HD space there isn't anything you can't have a lot of. On the other hand I/O, especially magnetic I/O is the main bottleneck. Storage isn't a problem.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Besides, who cares how long your site backup takes or how long it takes to fill up your DVR? That's where spinning disks are going.
Any business that want to remain in business cares significantly about backup times. Basically you want to backup as quickly as possible (ie. not during business hours) and if required recover just as quickly. Even with disk to disk backups (great and relatively cheap for home use) you are always going to have a latency problem. Unfortunately the more elaborate a backup and recovery strategy is the more expensive it becomes.
As for a DVR this is normally up to the household although it can be quite funny or stressful when you want backup up you favourite program and you have no more space on the disk. Mass panic to clean up normally happens. Anyone in the IT industry has seen this on a regular basis.
It must be remembered that backups are not about just recovering data to existing systems if required it is about recovering from disasters as well. It is quite scary that many companies have a half hearted approach to backup and recovery and many don't even go through the exercise of testing a disaster recovery scenario since they think it is going to be disruptive or is going to cost too much. Of course these companies are basically a disaster waiting to happen however it is very difficult for IT to explain to management that they need to test their disaster recovery processes when management can't understand that their own PC's need backing up (at least their user data) as well.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.