NCSU's Fingernail-Size Chip Can Hold 1TB

CWmike writes "Engineers from North Carolina State University have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold 1 trillion bytes (a terabyte) of data. They said their nanostructured Ni-MgO system can store up to 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text, 'far exceeding the storage capacities of today's computer memory systems.' Using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change, the engineers worked at nanoscale and added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers — a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers. The discovery represents a 90% size reduction compared with today's techniques, and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity. 'Instead of making a chip that stores 20 gigabytes, you have one that can handle one terabyte, or 50 times more data,' said the team's leader, Jagdish 'Jay' Narayan, director of the National Science Foundation Center for Advanced Materials and Smart Structures at the university."

Comments

Finger nail-sized chip?

[vertinox]

Are we talking in units of man hands or lady hands?

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[clyde_cadiddlehopper]

Mama was apparently wrong about nailbyting.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Tablizer]

Are we talking in units of man hands or lady hands?

I asked a female co-worker to help me compare, and she obliged......by flipping me off. At least I got a good look at her nail. The things we nerds endure for science.
     

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Anonymous Coward]

the real question is:

are we talking about european hands or african hands?

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[fast turtle]

The Trim Command works much better as it doesn't fragment the file system as badly as nailbyting does. So no, mama wasn't wrong

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn to spell moran.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Anonymous Coward]

That reminds me of a true story.

A few years ago I received my first PDA phone. It was HTC through AT&T and it did have a camera. I went through the office asking people for a picture for my phone. Explaining that when they dialed me, I could see their picture instead of the phone number. I went through about 20 offices and cubicles on my break to get those pictures.

They ALL GAVE ME THE FINGER. Every single one of those comical bastards. No prompting, No hesitation. It was, "Can I get a picture of you for my phone?". They all turned around and flipped me off. Women as well as men.

Even the owner of the company was there that day. He flipped me off too.

Could it have been me? Nah.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is an important question. As you know european hands are migratory, and this has caused me a great deal of trouble...

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Anonymous Coward]

w.
o.
o.
s.
h.
you.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Tablizer]

It was memories of the Vista you installed on all PC's.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you not see that the post you replied to had a spelling error ("moran")? Maybe the "w. o. o. s. h." belongs to you!

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[CecilPL]

Get a brain!

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[jesperhh]

Are we talking in units of man hands or lady hands?

This is clearly going to be the new kibi vs. kilobyte

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[OrangeTide]

Men have short wide fingernails on large hands. And women have long dainty fingernails on small hands. I wonder if statistically the area works out to be about the same.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Anonymous Coward]

And might I suggest you work on reading comprehension?

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Faylone]

I always keep several spares to distract any zombies.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meme recognition fail.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[mattack2]

and "fingernail-sized" is variable:
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records/human_body/body_parts/longest_fingernails_-_female.aspx

(just kidding)

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Anonymous Coward]

So when someone from the office calls you, you see a picture of them giving you a finger? That would definitely be a cool toy to show around the office.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[rrohbeck]

And how much is that in football fields? After all that's the canonical unit of area in the press.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Zonnald]

Insightful, really? Off topic certainly. Yet no mod points for me today.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Brian Gordon]

Personally I was confused by the "pages of text" unit of storage capacity. How many libraries of congress is that?

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Sulphur]

Did you thumbnail the pictures?

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[RivenAleem]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWfpohPmRD0

I'm not impressed by this chip size.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[uuddlrlrab]

Ugh, someone get the Troll repellent. They're apparently out in droves today.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you got some great evidence for a hostile work environment lawsuit :)

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[fotbr]

250 million pages of text. Or 10 one-page MS Word Documents.

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[iamhassi]

"Are we talking in units of man hands or lady hands?"

her fingernails, so roughly 1/4" x 36".

Re:Finger nail-sized chip?

[Anonymous Coward]

If that is true he not only deserved what he got - but I would of been locked up had he done it to me.

Trollin'.

[Z34107]

...have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold 1 trillion bytes (a terabyte) of data.

A trillion bytes is a terabyte? You best be trollin', summary.

Re:Trollin'.

[NoYob]

...have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold 1 trillion bytes (a terabyte) of data.

A trillion bytes is a terabyte? You best be trollin', summary.

Uh, yeah!

Re:Trollin'.

[Triela]

A trillion bytes?

1000000000000 b / 640 kb

That's enough for over 1.5 million people!!

Re:Trollin'.

[Monkeedude1212]

TB:1,000,000,000,000
TiB:1,099,511,627,776

Different notations as to whats a Terabyte, the second one being the binary notation.

But more importantly, the summary* doesn't say which notation they're using, but because they say trillion we can assume the former. Why is that important? Look at the numbers.Thats 99 Gigs of difference.

*(Because I wouldn't read the full article)

Re:Trollin'.

[selven]

TB is used for both. Operating systems prefer 1.1 trillion while hard drive makers prefer 1 trillion because it makes their stuff seem 10% bigger.

Re:Trollin'.

[maxfresh]

The confusion probably arises because not all countries and languages use the same terminology for large numbers.

There are two naming conventions in general use, short-scale, and long-scale. In the short-scale countries such as the US, UK, etc, Trillion = 10^12, but in the long-scale countries, Trillion = 10^18. Obviously, if you are in a long-scale country, a Trillion (10^18) bytes is a (10^6) times more than a Terabyte (10^12 bytes). You can see this article for more on short and long scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

Re:Trollin'.

[Hurricane78]

No. Because if they were any serious, they would be consistent in their meaning anyway, and, as it is standard in the storage industry, and as a SI unit, use TiB, if they meant TiB. And else TB. Period. No need to discuss it. Because that is all and everything.

Re:Trollin'.

[644bd346996]

The difference between one ISO terabyte and 1 TiB is relatively smaller than the variance among normal fingernails.

Re:Trollin'.

[Craig Davison]

It's safe to say now that "trillion", as an English word, means 10^12 in English-speaking places.

Re:Trollin'.

[sexconker]

Wrong.
TB: 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
TiB: Made up bullshit.

TB is not stepping on the toes of any sacred "standard" prefix. There is no confusion.

If there's a B, b, or a reference to bits or bytes, then it's in powers of 2. It's its own unit. Completely separate, though similar in scale, to the "classical" scalar prefixes.

It is IMPERATIVE to measure bits in (base 2) exponential terms because bits are quantum logical units. We count them, and we are concerned with possible comibnations in a given number of bits.

Re:Trollin'.

[retchdog]

Having 2^(x+3) bits has not a lot to do with the fact that you then have 2^(2^(x+3)) combinations of them... (except for certain integer math operations which are for implementation reasons faster if done on a power-of-2 number of bits, like cryptography. But this is not a fundamental matter.)

Also, "quantum logical units" made me vomit in my mouth.

Re:Trollin'.

[amilo100]

In my country both systems are used (one for English and one for my first language). They realized that this was still not confusing enough so they temporarily switched to the other and then switched back.

You can luckily usually guess which number it is - if it deals with government corruption or arms deals it is usually the larger one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#South_African_usage

Re:Trollin'.

[BikeHelmet]

You should clarify usage scenarios with your amounts.

Metric:
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776

OSX:
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776

Ubuntu/Linux:
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776

BSD: (last I checked)
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776

HDD Manufacturers: (Since before it became a problem)
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776

Windows:
TB: 1,099,511,627,776
TiB: WTF LOL

And of course, there are specific scenarios like RAM and cache where the incorrect suffixes are used to this day. When you have "3 MB" of L2 cache, you know it's 3072KiB, which is 3,145,728 bytes. It should be labelled "3 MiB", but it isn't.

Re:Trollin'.

[Waffle Iron]

If there's a B, b, or a reference to bits or bytes, then it's in powers of 2.

Not for bandwidth. Base-2 units have never been used to describe bandwidth. (If you have a 1MB per second connection, that's exactly 1,000,000 bytes per second.)

Not for hard drive capacity at any time later than ancient history.

Not for floppy disks, which were always in ridiculous mixed units of 1024*1000.

Not for optical media, which come in sizes like 4,700,000,000 bytes.

Not for file sizes reported in any non-braindead application.

In fact, not for anything other than solid state RAM.

So your assertion that "there is no confusion" is 100% false. The explicit distinction between TB and TiB should be strictly enforced in all contexts due to the historical abuse of SI terminology by people like you.

It is IMPERATIVE to measure bits in (base 2) exponential terms because bits are quantum logical units. We count them, and we are concerned with possible comibnations in a given number of bits.

This statement makes zero sense. You're confusing the number of permutations that "n" bits can denote with the number "n" itself. Just because the number of permutations of n bits happens to be 2**n, that property in no way constrains us to denote measurements of the number n itself in some strange hybrid derivative of base 2 and base 10. (Which is only slightly more convenient to do arithmetic with than Roman numerals. Quick: how many 100 MiB files fit onto a 4.377 GiB DVD?)

Re:Trollin'.

[marcansoft]

RAM and solid state Flash memory, which is becoming increasingly popular. NOR flash comes in power-of-two sizes, and NAND flash comes in power-of-two main data areas plus some power-of-two over power-of-two fraction in out-of-band area (64 OOB bytes per 2048 data bytes is common). However, Flash wear-leveling by controllers reduces available size, and sometimes they are designed so it works out at closer to a power-of-ten size, but that's just a random target (and they never actually nail it). It's also worth noting that storage block sizes are powers of two (512 byte sectors for HDDs, 2048 bytes for DVDs, and in reality both formats tend to use larger physical sectors of a power-of-two size too). So, in reality, there is no such thing as a purely decimal round size hard disk: it's all crazy mixed multiples that round off to somewhere close to a decimal unit yet still a multiple of a smaller binary unit. People keep complaining about the weird 1000*1024 units used by floppies (an artifact of turning 1440KiB into "1.44MB"), but that's how modern storage sizes are built too (except you report them as real power-of-ten rounded sizes in the end).

Powers of two are still heavily used as base units in the computing world. You can aim for a target near a power of 10, but very rarely do you see actual precise powers of ten in use. The common exception is clock rates and, by extension, bandwidth.

One typical place where users will see power-of-two sizes is in hard disk allocation size ("actual size on disk"). It's very evident for small files.

Re:Trollin'.

[Artifakt]

Agreed:

1. Quantum is too often a buzzword used on a par with 'synergizing syncronicities to leverage deflector dish rerouting'.

2. Quantum bits are now a real concept, and this use conflicts with that.

Now if 'sexconker' had said something along the lines of:
Since bits are physically base 2, and many operations in a machine are physically faster or more functional if done on integral exponents of 2 numbers of bits, measuring bits in base 2 is more meaningful...

I might have agreed.

There are other operations besides cryptography where powers of 2 figure into it. For just two examples: paging memory, sectoring drives (i.e. look at LBA, if anyone still has hard drives small enough that addressing is a choice. Whether fdisk (or similar) gave you certain partitioning options (and whether the drive actually worked afterwards) were base 2 dependent issues). Back when people still used Windows 98, it had a system to organise frequently loaded programs into '4 K' blocks, and it used that size even if the hard drive sectors were '16 K' or '32 K'. All those numbers were actually base 2, regardless of how Microsoft reported them on screen. If you're talking software, saying it's not fundamental is fair enough, but when you have to talk hardware, the special cases where it matters multiply rapidly.

      The debate reminds me of comparing American and French unemployment figures. Personally, I think people who have been out of work for a long time and given up reporting their status to the government should still be counted as best we can estimate them. Some formulas for reporting unemployment simply look better than others, or more basic to what we are measuring.
      There are some complex forms of unemployment measurement, such as estimating numbers of 'underemployed' people, or people who want a job with health insurance and cant move up into one, but those seem more ambiguous and of less general use. That's also how I see measuring memory in base 10.

Re:Trollin'.

[Snospar]

Almost right, except that bandwidth is always expressed in terms of bits rather than bytes (i.e. Mbps - "Mega Bits Per Second" where Mega = 1,000,000). In general, due to overheads from error correction, signalling and control protocols the actual throughput of a circuit does not equal the Mbps value divided by eight.

Just my tuppence worth ;-)

Re:Trollin'.

[bigdaisy]

Thats 99 Gigs of difference.

Thanks for muddying that up for us. Are those 99 decimal "Gigs" or 99 binary "Gigs"? Your comment doesn't say.

More importantly, by rounding off using normal conventions the difference is 100 GB or 93 GiB.

Re:Trollin'.

[master_p]

Since we are talking about digital computers based on the binary numerical system, using base 2 makes a lot more sense than using base 10.

Re:Trollin'.

[lufo]

1.01

Re:Trollin'.

[selven]

No, 1.1. 1 kib = 1.024 kb, 1 mib = 1.048 mb, i gib = 1.074 gb, 1 tib = 1.100 tb.

Re:Trollin'.

[sanosuke001]

Actually, CD-Rs are 700MiB (well, ~702MiB) where DVD-R's are 4.7GB. Why one is set in base-2 and the other in base-10 I never understood...

Re:Trollin'.

[uuddlrlrab]

Capacity insecurity? "Really, it's bigger! It's just the lack of OS file compression that makes it seem small!"

Re:Trollin'.

[swilver]

This is wrong. It's:

TB:1,099,511,627,776
TiB: Does not compute

Re:Trollin'.

[Uzik2]

I read it. They didn't actually implement memory, They don't have read or write hardware. It's just something that might be used for memory some day.

Re:Trollin'.

[Waffle Iron]

Since we are talking about digital computers based on the binary numerical system, using base 2 makes a lot more sense than using base 10.

Maybe it would in a world full of nothing but assembly coders, but a term such as "27 MiB" is *not* binary. It's an odd mixture of a base-10 number and a base-2 multiplier.

If you want to stick close to the hardware, you should use exclusively hexadecimal arithmetic. However, the vast majority of users have no frigging clue what number base a computer internally uses, don't care about such implementation details, and have been brought up since childhood to think in decimal. Spreadsheets don't display their results in hex for good reason, and neither should file manager applications.

Re:Trollin'.

[sexconker]

You're an idiot.
A bit is a quantum logical unit.
It's not a buzzword. It's what it is.

Re:Trollin'.

[sexconker]

Base 10 moran is wrong again.

Bits/bytes have NEVER been used to measure bandwidth. Baud has.

Anyone using bits/bytes for bandwidth is an idiot.

Bits/bytes are for throughput.

And yes - people still lie in this measurement to make it look bigger.

Hard drive capacity is driven by the same bullshit marketing.

Optical media is the same. Hell, they even include a lot of overhead and unusable space - DVD-5 and DVD-9.

File sizes are reported PROPERLY, using 1024, in any competent program/OS.

The only people who are confused are the idiots who insist on 1000.

No, I'm not confusing anything. And you've got it wrong - we don't measure bits, we count them. This is where you and all other SI proponents fail. Bits are quantum and are counted - they are not measured classically. Hybrid derivative? 1024 is a power of two that is a convenient size to work with. 1000 is a power of 10 that is a convenient size to work with.

The explicit distinction was made after decades of work and science had been done using 1024. Changing the fucking meaning to 1000 CAUSES confusion when you look at any work done before the change.

1024 is correct, and always has been.
1000 is wrong, and always will be.
It's not an SI unit, it's not meant to be.
It doesn't step on the toes of any SI units. If there's a b or B, it's using 1024, and for good reason.

If you're confused, don't work with computers.

Quick, how many 100 MB files fit onto a 4.377 GB DVD?

Man you just proved that you don't get it.
What were you trying to prove with that? That the ibi bullshit is easier to work with? But it means the exact same thing as the correct scalar prefixes do.

And even in your magical land of KB = 1000 B and KiB meaning 1024 B, the question is just as quickly answered because you have the same base (1000 vs 1024) on either side.

QUICK! How many 22 ButtLoad morans fit into a 52 ShitLoad box!?

Duh, 52 / 22 * ShitLoad / ButtLoad
= 2.36... AssLoad morans

Re:Trollin'.

[Waffle Iron]

Quick, how many 100 MB files fit onto a 4.377 GB DVD?

So answer it, asshole, without getting out a calculator. Go ahead.

Re:Trollin'.

[killjoy966]

It's actually only a 92 GB difference.

Re:Trollin'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know what computers are really good at? Doing basic arithmetic. Just because computers use binary internally there is no reason for them to expose that to users.

Dang it!

[mhajicek]

I'm going to have to buy The White Album again!

Re:Dang it!

[Tablizer]

I'm going to have to buy The White Album again!

I just bleach my shaded albums.
   

Re:Dang it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, they already announced that they'll be re-releasing it on a USB drive shaped like an apple.

damn

[LiquidCoooled]

that is tiny.
If that had been available earlier this year, I wouldv had it implanted :D

Re:damn

[Rei]

Implanted? Just like that? Are you one of these people? ;)

Re:damn

[wjh31]

you only got 1TB in your chip? man you should see all the HD 4D holo video i can fit on my Exabyte implant.

Signed:
Time Traveler from 2030

Re:damn

[Tablizer]

that is tiny. If that had been available earlier this year, I wouldv had it implanted

Do you by chance drive a flying saucer?
     

Re:damn

[Culture20]

If that had been available earlier this year, I wouldv had it implanted :D

Until we hit the Moore's Law wall, implanting anything will result in multiple surgeries for upgrades or useless tech stuck in your body.

Re:damn

[LiquidCoooled]

hahaha
I had an opportunity earlier this year, I considered having a memory upgrade or a stylus inserted.
I made a journal entry about it here when it happened, its still makes me wince.

Re:damn

[notmyusualnickname]

I've thought about some sort of biologically inert sheathing that would allow for out-patient (or in-store) type cut-and-replace upgrades, otherwise digging audiovisual chips out would get unnecessarily messy as the speed of improvements increased. (Either that or early adopters would be stuck with inferior systems for a while, and that would never do...)

Re:damn

[mhajicek]

The thing to do would be to just implant an interface device. The hardware you interface with will be much easier to replace that way.

Re:damn

[Hucko]

I'm getting LightPeak connections installed next year.

Re:damn

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a generation stamp. If you act quickly, you'll be a proud member of the terabyte generation. The sooner you do the op, the sooner you can start telling kids to get off your lawn.

Re:damn

[NatasRevol]

Nice implants!

Re:damn

[NatasRevol]

Would that be SCSI40,SCSI80,SCSI160, VGA, USB1, USB1.1, USB2.0, USB3.0, FW400, FW800, RG-6, RJ45, RJ11, or something else...that's obsolete before you age to another demographic?

Re:damn

[bertoelcon]

So I want the gigabyte stamp then, I'll stay off the mega, and kilobytes lawns too.

Re:damn

[sexconker]

The RJ series of course, refers to the JACK, and not the cable or wiring standard.

But carry on.

Re:damn

[Anonymous Coward]

Soooo John Titor, at last we meet again, IPv4 connection to IPv4 connection. I am Borg Gates, I killed your father. You have no chance to survive make your time. Prepare to be assimilated. One thousand nations of the software empire descend upon you!

And so, my..."friend", my CAPTCHA is "combats". Oh yes, the God of Tech has with no ambiguity surely smiled upon me. I shall as well facilely smile with graciousness once thy pitiful organic self is succumbed to mine incogitable powers beyond mortal existence. May the nefarious demigod BAAL-MUUR smite thee with His most grandiose application of impulse upon a mobile accommodation for positioning the posterior.
Mwohohohohohoho!!!!!!!

Re:damn

[Artifakt]

The early adopters would pay a lot more, but their obsolete systems would be built like bricks and come with a bunch of quirky features that would be dropped from latter tech generations because they didn't appeal to a broad enough section of the market.
(See Walter John Williams novel "Hardwired", where early artificial retina designs came with Sepia-tone and Film Noir menu items, but only a few people liked them).

Re:damn

[mdwh2]

People might choose it, but as long as it's good enough for its purpose, there isn't a need for that. Consider, is space flight with computers unfeasible, because we can't recall the probes back to upgrade the computers?

Re:damn

[zevans]

Cables? How quaint.

What is the ETA?

[mr_stinky_britches]

Sounds promising, but how many months/years/decades before we can reasonably expect to see this used on a wide scale?

Re:What is the ETA?

[RabidMoose]

Same as always, "three to five years". (I'm just guessing. Of course I haven't RTFA.)

Re:What is the ETA?

[Viper23]

Not to mention, this a lab chip. How long before it can survive being in a consumer environment?

Re:What is the ETA?

[Tablizer]

Sounds promising, but how many months/years/decades before we can reasonably expect to see this used on a wide scale?

Don't worry, all flying cars will have at least one. Further, the next version of Duke Nukem will ship on such a chip.
     

Re:What is the ETA?

[TheKidWho]

Probably when existing techniques can not be scaled down anymore economically.

But..

[Anonymous Coward]

How many Libraries of Congress can it store?

Re:But..

[Anonymous Coward]

1/100th

There is no chip.

[victim]

They have made a material which could if you designed a suitable chip and associated circuitry, and figured out how to manufacture it at large scale, would let you store a terabyte of data on a fingernail sized chip.

The whoever wrote the article title should be embarrassed, as should timothy for propagating it.

Re:There is no chip.

[Kjella]

Two words: Page hits.

Re:There is no chip.

[Anonymous Coward]

Two better words: Huge tits.

I even re-used a lot of your letters...

Re:There is no chip.

[popo]

Two better words: Small chips.

I guess we all get excited about different things.

Re:There is no chip.

[Anonymous Coward]

smoke that joint

Re:There is no chip.

[Phat_Tony]

I found an even more impressive material, and I can already manufacture it myself in bulk.

Each base of DNA can be AGT or C, so that's 2 bits worth of data per base pair.

A terabyte = 1.1259E+15 bits, so a terabyte of DNA is 5.6295E+14 base pairs.

For mass, [5.6295E+14 base pairs] x [660 daltons per base pair] = [3.71547E+17 daltons] = 6.169686786411827E-7 grams = .62 micrograms per terabyte.

That's smaller than my fingernail by a pretty good margin. In fact, my actual fingernail already contains maybe a petabyte of storage.

Unlike their new super material, I've already developed (well, OK, discovered. Well, no, read about other people discovering) techniques for reading, writing, and copying data with this storage medium.

However, like them, I haven't worked out any computer interface yet.

Re:There is no chip.

[kaizokuace]

It's not the size that matters. It's how you use it ;p

Re:There is no chip.

[shadowofwind]

Years ago I worked a product that had an IC feature that could be manufactured reliably 99.99% of the time. For a real device with millions of such features that averages to almost zero yield, and this problem was not overcome. For some technologies the manufacturing yield hurdle can be overcome, for others it can't be. So although seeing a small number of memory cells work correctly is interesting and worthwhile, by itself that doesn't tell us whether we will ever see this technology in an actual product.

Re:There is no chip.

[icannotthinkofaname]

$ dd if=Phat_Tony/dna of=Phat_Tony.iso
. . .
*at least five years later*
Okay, then, let's see what we can make of this data.

Re:There is no chip.

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, my actual fingernail already contains maybe a petabyte of storage.
 

You need to wash your hands more often

Re:There is no chip.

[Anonymous Coward]

SUre you can interface it with a PC - you just did in typing that comment!

Re:There is no chip.

[Anonymous Coward]

Each base of DNA can be AGT or C, so that's 2 bits worth of data per base pair.

Hair or nail splitting, which is nearly the same, I believe this is incorrect since IIRC A pairs with T and G with C, but A cannot pair with G or C... or something like that.

Re:There is no chip.

[skelly33]

yeah whatever - that's just what people with small chips say.

Re:There is no chip.

[Hatta]

No, A only pairs with T, and G only pairs with C. T paired with A is not the same as A paired with T. The cell only reads one strand of the DNA (at a time), so you really don't have to worry about what it's paired with. Since there are 4 possibilities, AGCT, that's 2 bits.

Re:There is no chip.

[Anonymous Coward]

DNA, double-ha!

All of God's unique creations are his storage medium, not yours. Also, priests throughout history obviously learned of lossy-interpretive compression schemes from the almighty. That's why there's so many new codes being discovered in religious texts, the compression ratio is almost infinite. Unfortunately, their ad-hoc approach to decompression still leaves something to be desired.

P.S. You can tell where God stores its porn, too. Just look at the duck billed platypus. Look at it!

Re:There is no chip.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, it wouldn't be the first (or even the 100th) time for Timothy. If slashdotters could grade the folks that do the article posting, Timothy would be flipping burgers by now.

Re:There is no chip.

[adaviel]

It's still interesting, but yeah, the title's misleading. See http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Re:There is no chip.

[catmistake]

They have made a material which could if you designed a suitable... and figured out how to manufacture it at large scale, would let you....

The whoever wrote the article title should be embarrassed, as should timothy for propagating it.

Unless the article is a sham, they already have mass manufactured this memerrific material — and it's also comprised of some mimetic polyalloy that's already replaced them. Then won't you be embarrassed.

Re:There is no chip.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget all the compression you could achieve by storing redundant data on the paired strand!

Re:There is no chip.

[MistarOblivion]

Though your suggestion is obviously tongue in cheek, I just thought it might be good to point out that there are pretty intractable problems with using DNA as a storage medium. It is VERY SLOW to copy (it takes several hours for human cells w/ ~3 billion letters to divide) and is prone to errors during copying.

Re:There is no chip.

[marcansoft]

These days the quality of memory is crap though. Just look at NAND flash: there are hundreds of failed blocks on most chips, and these days sectors with a bad bit or two are used and just error corrected. Same with hard disks. You work around this by shoving large amounts of error detection, correction, and relocation logic into the controller.

Let's say each individual bit (!) can be manufactured reliably 99.99% of the time. For a 2048-byte sector (typical for NAND flash), using sector-granularity remapping, there's a ~20% chance of a sector being good. That's not very good, but it still gives you 19% usable capacity. At a terabyte per chip, that's still 190GB of storage. If you add single-bit error correction, you'd get 500GB of storage. At 2-bit correction, 750GB. Current generation Flash memory already uses multiple-bit ECC for MLC level flash memory (where typically 2 bits will fail at once), and sectors with one bad bit(pair) are considered "good enough" and corrected away. If you can manufacture this 1TB storage chip at 99.99% per bit, and especially if most of the failures will happen at manufacture time and not develop later during use, I'll gladly take it given a reasonable amount of error correction wrapping it. It's not like we don't already rely on ECC for our day-to-day storage.

Yield issues affect mainly things like CPUs with no redundancy. With memory, you just lose the damaged parts. Even RAM these days is manufactured with spare blocks that can replace blocks that came out wrong, to increase yield (though it's usually only a few and the remapping is burned in at the factory).

Re:There is no chip.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're slightly off.

A terabyte == 1024*1024*1024*1024*8 bits, 8796093022208 to be exact. That's 8.796E+12, nowhere near +15.

Re:There is no chip.

[SharpFang]

It isn't entirely true. It just requires chips with partially programmable logic to switch features off.
Lots of modern GPUs have around 50% yield per one vertex/pixel shader unit. Then they get sold as "LE", standard and "GT" versions, depending on how many shader units work - the silicon is the same, but the firmware disables failed units and the cheap version has 4 of them, the medium has 8 and the deluxe has 12 working units.

Simply use redundancy and disable failed parts of the chip.

Re:There is no chip.

[Phat_Tony]

Yeah, I came up with 2^10 per prefix, then kilo-mega-giga-tera is 4 prefixes so 4x10=40, plus 3 powers to get us from bits to bytes, = 2^43 for a terabyte... which yields exactly your answer. I have no idea what feat of "I'm in a hurry" cut-and-past calculator usage led me to paste in that 2^43= 1x10^15. "Slightly off," only three orders of magnitude.

Anyway, the error actually hurt my argument. The point stands that if we're supposed to be impressed that they've found a high density storage medium without means to mass produce, interface with computers, or read and write, then nature's already provided us with something much more impressive.

Re:There is no chip.

[belthize]

The resulting storage of 1,000,000 people typing away on slashdot will eventually encode a monkey.

Re:There is no chip.

[shadowofwind]

I said 'millions of such features', not a dozen. Devices do have redundant elements, but not on that order of magnitude.

Re:There is no chip.

[shadowofwind]

Interesting post. One problem with the product I spoke of, which was one-time programmable, is there was no way to tell at the factory which cells were good.

Re:There is no chip.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like we don't already rely on ECC for our day-to-day storage.

I work for an international automotive supplier. Our German counterparts have this boss ... *shudder*; he insists the ECC on our latest micros (single bit correction, dual bit detection) is a "convenience feature", not sufficient RAM protection, and we're better off using our old algorithm based on writing and reading back test patterns during idle time ... He argues that way we can catch errors "before" we need to use the corrupted data (never mind the amount of time it takes to scan through the entire RAM).

He is not known for rational decision making.

Re:There is no chip.

[SharpFang]

...depends on how they are used - if they are a kind of extremely common pass-through elements that play a support role to others, then yes, it makes no sense. If they are used as end-of-the-line devices, like memory cells, arranged into memory banks, if one cell has 99.99% success rate, a bank of 1K has 90% success rate, and you'd have to produce only about 10% more of them than the device requires. Then passing the address bus through a remap might prove profitable. Unless of course the new feature provides less than 10% value improvement over the old, reliable one...

Great , Now The N.S.A. Data Mining Project

[Anonymous Coward]

of Google's 10 million servers can be
carried around in a cell phone.

Yours In Novorossiysk,
Kilgore T.

Moore's Law meets Bohr's Atom

[Nefarious Wheel]

It had to happen eventually. Whether or not this is the actual limit, deponent answereth not.

Is this a real writable chip?

[dschuetz]

Or just a demonstration of an artificial structure with resolution / density that'd permit 1 TB in whatever their size is?

I didn't see anything in the article that leads me to believe it's an actual storage device. Come to think of it, I'm not sure it's even necessarily a "fingernail-sized" chip they made, just that if you scaled their research to that size it'd hold 1 TB.

Any information other than this incredibly vague article? (I swear, more and more frequently we're seeing useless articles that say even less than the press release they're drawn from. And aren't the press releases often DESIGNED to be vague and over-promising, possibly to attract more research dollars?) Be nice if we'd just see their actual research, or a rough draft of a paper, or even just a frank interview with the geeks involved.

Re:Is this a real writable chip?

[John Hasler]

The actual press release does not claim that they "made a chip". That's a fabrication of the ComputerWorld reporter.

Re:Is this a real writable chip?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a fabrication of the ComputerWorld reporter.

If the reported fabricated it, why wouldn't he report about his chip then?

Re:Is this a real writable chip?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care if it's NCSU or ComputerWorld, but at least someone has fabricated out this chip already. I'd hate to find out this was just vaporware.

Re:Is this a real writable chip?

[canajin56]

So, ComputerWorld fabricated the fabrication of the chip?

Re:Is this a real writable chip?

[Nethead]

Fab-ri-ca-tion. It's making me wait, it keeps me waiting. (Apologies to Carly Simon.(and Hinze ketchup))

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I can store more porn which is the reason you need a new hard disk.

I wonder...

[allknowingfrog]

I wonder when personal computers will catch up with cell phones and mp3 players - any smaller, and we'll just lose them.

"A man with a tape recorder up his nose" . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . so now I know how the Monty Python crew pulled off that trick . . . this music was stored on his fingernail!

Re:"A man with a tape recorder up his nose" . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a fingernail in my radio... Car!

I understand we're geeks and all

[Viper23]

but:

The process would allow them to develop a new generation of ceramic engines able to withstand twice the temperatures of normal engines. The engines could potentially achieve fuel economy of 80 miles per gallon, Narayan said.

Could we at least have mentioned that this technology could potentially double the fuel efficiency of car engines???

Re:I understand we're geeks and all

[icannotthinkofaname]

Is that sort of like doubling the clock speed of a CPU?

Just trying to get a computer analogy out there, so that I can understand what you're talking about with respect to cars.

Re:I understand we're geeks and all

[zoloto]

You're probably the only person to read the actual article.

Re:I understand we're geeks and all

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like halving the wattage of every component in your compy, silly.

Terabyte problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta have ten bytes I have stored in a short two secs time in that terabyte of data. What do I do to get to it if it isn't super-fast recalled? Like speed...there is a limit to storage cap with speed..............

This is progress?

[countertrolling]

I don't think so

Performance?

[saleenS281]

It's great that you can store 1TB on it, but what does the performance look like? If it takes me 4 hours to pull a gig of data off of it, it's nearly useless. I could see some very, very corner cases where you need to store data indefinitely, and would be able to recover it with no timeline attached, but that's awfully rare nowadays. I want to see IOPS and access time ;) I'm also wondering how you would even read and write data. They seem to have left that detail out.

Re:Performance?

[Tim C]

I could see some very, very corner cases where you need to store data indefinitely, and would be able to recover it with no timeline attached, but that's awfully rare nowadays.

A couple of years ago I worked on a web-based system for searching over database records. Access to and use of the system was monitored, with details of who saw what when written to a database.

While we never took it this far, there was talk of future requirements to store X years' worth of data online (done) with the rest of the data stored off-line but searchable on request essentially forever. There was no talk of what sort of time frame those searches would be required to run in, but the general feeling I got was that less than a couple of weeks would be acceptable.

Not quite what you're talking about, but pretty close. Of course the singular of data isn't anecdote :)

nanotech on its way

[dissy]

While they are light on details, the article implies this is a long term storage system (IE a flash chip replacement)

One would think creating RAM with a similar density would be possible as well.

I've used a super computer that had 74 TB of main memory, but clearly is something one can not afford nor fit in the home, to put it mildly. In a few years, will we have 1tb dimms at home? That would be sweet.

Even lacking that, a 1tb flash-like chip (not as in technology, but as in purpose/use) is still a huge improvement.

Let's just hope it doesn't go the way of the 100tb optical discs that are 'going into production within a year' for the last 10 years.

On a happier note, just imagine the reactions the RIAA/MPAA lawyers would have to such a thing existing!
"Now all of your 'IP' fits on a nine finger-nail-sized set!"

Re:nanotech on its way

[Monkeedude1212]

Yeah, I mean, I haven't used a super computer before, but I did use a Mac Pro once.

I'll be happy when I can Grab a Dell with those specs at a decent price.

Re:nanotech on its way

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a busted Mac Cube at home as a bookend. I think that was the first Super Computer I broke.

Re:nanotech on its way

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now all of your 'IP' fits on a nine finger-nail-sized set!"

Or say 1 Nine-Inch-Nail? Oh... Wait... I don't think you can say "Nine-Inch-Nail" with out the RIAA/MPAA all over your ass.

Nathan

Selective doping works well...

[BobMcD]

...athletes have been making millions that way for years!

Re:Selective doping works well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry man, but... You decide to post a comment to Slashdot, and for a topic you pick sports?

Wait!!!

[Dunbal]

can store up to 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text

      Wait, how many Libraries of Congress is that??? Now I'm totally confused, you keep switching the units on me!

      On second thoughts, it can probably store 1 copy of Windows 8.

Re:Wait!!!

[jnaujok]

That's 0.01 LOC's.

You're Welcome.

Re:Wait!!!

[colfer]

DVD's store 20 GB now?

Re:Wait!!!

[colfer]

Err, I mean 50 GB?

Re:Wait!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, notice the High Definition... Blu-ray can store up to 50GB dual-layer. 25GB single layer.

Re:Wait!!!

[mister_playboy]

high-definition DVDs

Maybe they mean HD-DVD or Blu-ray.

Re:Wait!!!

[batquux]

Which puts this device at around 5.351x10^5 libraries of congress per football field.

Re:Wait!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bluray.

Re:Wait!!!

[dbIII]

Wait, how many Libraries of Congress is that???

Enough Libraries of Congress to fill a line of Volkswagens parked end to end on a football field.

Re:Wait!!!

[oddaddresstrap]

Wait, how many Libraries of Congress is that??? Now I'm totally confused, you keep switching the units on me!

You're still using the wrong units. It's about 1.5 Alamodomes.

Re:Wait!!!

[arachnoprobe]

How much is that in POOT (Power Output Of Togo)?

The good news

[spun]

It will be commercially available by January. The bad news is, this is a write only memory device.

Re:The good news

[veganboyjosh]

Write only?

So you can write to it, but you can't read it? Sounds about as useful as skywriting, sparklers, and messages left in below-low-tide beach sand would be for long term storage.

Re:The good news

[OnlyPostsWhilstDrunk]

Yeah, it's for classified documents.

Re:The good news

[TheLostSamurai]

It will be commercially available by January. The bad news is, this is a write only memory device.

Wow, that sucks. I was hoping I could read the data after I wrote it.

Re:The good news

[riskeetee]

I'm not sure which is funnier, the parent post or that it got modded "informative." LOL

Re:The good news

[Idbar]

So, is this some sort of Schrodinger's box? You write the data, but you just don't know if is there or not?

Re:The good news

[Therefore I am]

That's not bad news at all. The entire world is waiting for a reliable way of storing massive amounts of data on a permanent basis. If the report is based on truth then it might well be the answer to the vexing problems of lost data.... Counter-intuitively,if they make it too small it will be easy to lose the chip - back to square one!

Re:The good news

[fractalspace]

Workaround is to make a backup of your data before writing to this device, just in case you need it again.

Re:The good news

[maharb]

Parent is modded informative, rofl.

Re:The good news

[eyepeepackets]

Well, I thought that was pretty damn funny: The guy who marked you informative must be having a very sarcastic day.

Re:The good news

[spun]

"Write only memory" is such a hoary old joke, I'm surprised it got modded up at all. I'm doubly surprised it got modded informative. I'm triply surprised that some people have responded as if I was actually serious.

*sigh*

Re:The good news

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank goodness. I've needed a new /dev/null for a while now. The old one was getting full.

Re:The good news

[Stupid McStupidson]

And what, exactly, is wrong with sparklers?

Re:The good news

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you can never observe the data, it will for ever be simultaneously there and not there. Or until you destroy the chip with a thermite reaction. Good data security practices and all...

Re:The good news

[The Archon V2.0]

"Write only memory" is such a hoary old joke, I'm surprised it got modded up at all. I'm doubly surprised it got modded informative. I'm triply surprised that some people have responded as if I was actually serious.

5 days back I got +2 funny and +1 informative for a DHMO hoax post. So not surprising.

*sigh*

Though it speaks more to powers of observation than common geek sense, I had a similar thing happen at work.

I printed the old Signetics WOM ad and posted it in the impromptu "important papers" space I have behind my desk, along with various other legitimate techie things, like lists of local shops that can do warranty repairs on Model X or Product Line Y. It was ages (literally about 3 months) before someone else from the service department called me on it. (He's the sort who's at home with a soldering iron - it was the bogus block diagram that tipped him off. No one paid the big "WRITE ONLY MEMORY" line at top any mind.)

Re:The good news

[jmknsd]

I have one of those already, mounted on /dev/null.
I'm not sure how big it is, but I have been writing stuff to it for years and it is still not full.

Re:The good news

[mirix]

I always enjoyed the part about the chip needing 6.3V AC for the filament, like an old vacuum tube; always cracks me up. The "amount of pins left vs. socket insertions" is gold too.

I think I printed it and caught a few people on it in the past, or rather, it took them far too long to clue in that it's a joke. And I'm not talking about grandparents, but people in the field. :-)

Re:The good news

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the point of storing data if you can't read it again later?

Re:The good news

[Anonymous Coward]

so its basically /dev/null

dont we already haave that technology?

Re:The good news

[crtreece]

write only? or write once?

Seems like reading is a pretty important feature, but what do I know.

Re:The good news

[marcosdumay]

What do you think your computer mounts as /dev/null?

With this chip Windows 8 will be ready to roll out

[moxsam]

Yeah, I know that's humour from the age of floppy disks and Zee-Dee-Roms.

Can someone explain to me...

[Gordo_1]

how we go from the below scientific journal abstract to the Slashdot headline: "NCSU's Fingernail-Size Chip Can Hold 1TB"?

We have investigated the magnetic properties of the Ni-MgO system with an Ni concentration of 0.5 at.%. In as-grown crystals, Ni ions occupy substitutional Mg sites. Under these conditions the Ni-MgO system behaves as a perfect paramagnet. By using a controlled annealing treatment in a reducing atmosphere, we were able to induce clustering and form pure Ni precipitates in the nanometer size range. The size distribution of precipitates or nanodots is varied by changing annealing time and temperature. Magnetic properties of specimens ranging from perfect paramagnetic to ferromagnetic characteristics have been studied systematically to establish structure-property correlations. The spontaneous magnetization data for the samples, where Ni was precipitated randomly in MgO host, fits well to Bloch's T3/2-law and has been explained within the framework of spin wave theory predictions.

Seriously, do you see anything about a chip in there? Anyone? Bueller?

Re:Can someone explain to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too.

The best I can gather is that these guys formed some nano strucrures, which is commodity technology these days.

I did not get a strong quantum mechanics vibe from the linked info.

How are the data supposed to be read/write onto these 'chips'?
Sounds like a "it can be done"-type exercise.

Re:Can someone explain to me...

[u38cg]

Gawd knows where the numbers came from, but the point seems sound enough: they can create a substrate and magnetise it arbitrarily, so you have something that can in theory serve as a data storage medium.

LoC?

[swanzilla]

Ten fingernails, each with 1/10 LoC capacity...the future is here, my friends.

Re:LoC?

[mhajicek]

That's 1/100. Wait another decade.

Re:LoC?

[nnnneedles]

"Just imagine, materials with 10 times the strength of steel and only a fraction of the weight; shrinking all the information at the Library of Congress into a device the size of a sugar cube; detecting cancerous tumors that are only a few cells in size. Some of these research goals will take 20 or more years to achieve. But that is why — precisely whythere is such a critical role for the federal government."

--Bill Clinton, 2000

Looks like his super impossible vision might be attained just a few years after proposing it

Go Moore!

[hrimhari]

Hey, if we multiply the capacity x size ratio by 50, does that mean that Moore's Law gets a vacation for the next, uhm... 5-6 years?

Re:Go Moore!

[treeves]

No. Moore's Law applies to processors, not storage.

Re:Go Moore!

[hrimhari]

Well, actually it applies to the number of transistors on a chip. And memory capacity is cited as an example.

Re:Go Moore!

[treeves]

You're right that it's # of transistors/chip, but hard drives, magnetic tapes, and the particular device/material in TFA do not use transistors to store data. I should have said "processors and RAM". There are other similar "laws" (e.g. Kryder's Law for hard drives), referenced in that wikipedia article, but Moore's Law applies to transistors, as you pointed out.

Harnessing energy from an electron's spin??!!!

[flajann]

I find this article a bit confusing, because it speaks of "harnessing the energy of a spinning electron":

"Most energy used today is harnessed through the movement of current and is limited by the amount of heat that it produces, but the energy created by the spinning of electrons produces no heat," the university state in a press release.

Anyone who knows anything at all about quantum mechanics knows that the spin of an electron is quantized and cannot change.

The Wikipedia article has this to say about spintronics:

Electrons are spin-1/2 fermions and therefore constitute a two-state system with spin "up" and spin "down". To make a spintronic device, the primary requirements are to have a system that can generate a current of spin polarized electrons comprising more of one spin species—up or down—than the other (called a spin injector), and a separate system that is sensitive to the spin polarization of the electrons (spin detector). Manipulation of the electron spin during transport between injector and detector (especially in semiconductors) via spin precession can be accomplished using real external magnetic fields or effective fields caused by spin-orbit interaction.

This makes MUCH more sense! Reporters are always notorious for getting the science wrong.

Re:Harnessing energy from an electron's spin??!!!

[blueg3]

the spin of an electron is quantized and cannot change

Except for the two states, spin up and spin down, as you mention below (though real systems are not necessarily that simple).

However, it's strictly impossible for an information-processing machine to produce no heat, as information processing is an entropy-reducing process.

The pest of the retards unit standards.

[Hurricane78]

that can hold 1 trillion bytes (a terabyte) of data

What's the point of saying "1 trillion"? Do you honestly expect anyone on this site to not know what a terabyte is? Or what is that good for?
Because, you know how the world works: When you lower your standards, and allow dumber people to use it... Then dumber people you shall have!
But not just dumber people. A Gaussian curve of dumber people. Including some, that don't even get *that*.
So if you then continue to sustain that endless cycle, you will soon find out, that only retards you will have left.

Comparison sucks

[the person standing]

no bigger than 10 square nanometers — a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers

Why not compare area to area: A diameter of 1 million nanometers is 1000000 ^ 2 * pi = about 3140000000000 square nanometers.

Re:Comparison sucks

[Jake Griffin]

That, and 1 million nanometers = 1 millimeter, which is much larger than a pin head. The body of most pins is usually less than a millimeter.

Re:Comparison sucks

[Jake Griffin]

Oh, and your equation is wrong... pi r^2, not pi d^2, so the answer would be 1/4 of 3140000000000

awesome news

[Icegryphon]

Now I will be one step closer to having a complete backup of the internet.

The Abstract.

[Jason Pollock]

Here is the paper's abstract:

Abstract: We have investigated the magnetic properties of the Ni-MgO system with an Ni concentration of 0.5 at.%. In as-grown crystals, Ni ions occupy substitutional Mg sites. Under these conditions the Ni-MgO system behaves as a perfect paramagnet. By using a controlled annealing treatment in a reducing atmosphere, we were able to induce clustering and form pure Ni precipitates in the nanometer size range. The size distribution of precipitates or nanodots is varied by changing annealing time and temperature. Magnetic properties of specimens ranging from perfect paramagnetic to ferromagnetic characteristics have been studied systematically to establish structure-property correlations. The spontaneous magnetization data for the samples, where Ni was precipitated randomly in MgO host, fits well to Bloch’s T3/2-law and has been explained within the framework of spin wave theory predictions.

Now, my question is, how do you store information in that? If the material is paramagnetic, that implies it isn't stored like a disk (read/write using a magnetic field)? How are they planning on storing information in a clump of nickel atoms? (Note: I know absolutely nothing about this stuff)

Can we change the title of this post?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we change the title of this post to...

NCSU's THEORETICAL Fingernail-Size Chip Can Hold 1TB

Modded 'informative'???

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators, something just went 'whoosh' over your heads.

Another bogus materials-science article

[Animats]

This is yet another of those articles where somebody did something vaguely promising in materials science, and it's immediately being touted as if it were a product.

They're not talking about a "chip" at all. The material they've produced sounds more like something that might work as a disk surface. "Under these conditions the Ni-MgO system behaves as a perfect paramagnet." It's not clear what you'd use as a read/write head, even if they can create a surface of "nanodots".

Wait...whos fingernails????

[pablo_max]

I mean...they could be going by these:
http://thechive.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/longest-fingernails-world.jpg

Which, to be honest..would not be too impressive to stick 1TB on a fingernail like that.

Warning: Recursive Content

[Tablizer]

Now I will be one step closer to having a complete backup of the internet.

Won't ever fit because we store the backup on the internet.
   

Re:Warning: Recursive Content

[Icegryphon]

Backups of Backups?
Is this like turtles all the way down?

Just say no to wikipedia

[OrangeTide]

Wikipedia is wrong, as usual. A terabit, terabyte or teraword is 40 address lines. You can say it's 10e12 when they go back to making decade logic. If you want to get punched in the face then say tebi.

Re:Just say no to wikipedia

[enoz]

I may still call it a terabyte, but I damn well will write/display it as "TiB".

So bite me.

Re:Just say no to wikipedia

[Sabriel]

Tera: the SI prefix for one (short-scale) trillion, 10e12. Terabyte: 10e12 bytes. And yeah, I know you're referring to 2^40 = 1 099 511 627 776, but just because an apple is a fruit doesn't mean an orange isn't.

that reminds me of...

[cosm]

CREEPROM!

Can we finally loose CDs & DVD's then ?

[bobjr94]

Just goto walmart, buy your HD movie, music, PS4 game, etc...on a flash card ? Plug it into your mp3 player, car deck, TV, Xbox, PC.....Well, probably not PS4 since its from sony it would use its own special sony only format. But everyone else just use a universal flash media format, and it wouldnt get ruined by a scratch from dust either.

Bad linux jokes for 1000

[cosm]

Alex: "Two geeks penetrating a system backdoor?"

Contestant: "What is DDRASSRAM?, Alex."

Alex: Painfully correct sir, painfully correct.

How many angels comprise a megabyte?

[mi]

The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers -- a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers

We are so close to answering the ancient question — how many angels would fit on a pinhead? The prevailing opinion is, angels are ethereal beings, and thus infinite number of them would fit anywhere. But information is not tangible either (some even refuse to accept, that it can be owned), and yet obvious — if ever shrinking — limits exist to information concentration...

Fun with units!

[Interoperable]

a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers

Also, 1 millimeter, a giga-picometer, a tera-femtometer, a....

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not the same Jagdish from Animal House is it?

ROM or EEPROM/flash?

[peter]

I wasn't sure at first if they were setting the data by doping the material, but on closer reading
"The engineers manipulated the nanomaterial so the electrons' spin within the material could be controlled, ..."
makes it sound electrically re-writeable. Which is probably the only thing anyone's really interested in,
unless it was super-cheap. (i.e. cheap enough to replace pressed optical discs with ROM USB-storage.)

As bobjr94 hopes, it would be nice if it is that cheap, though, and optical discs are replaced by a standard flash storage standard.

Base 2...

[Anonymous Coward]

However, we would expect 2^40 bytes (1099511627776). 10^12 bytes is a little more than 92 GB (using 2^30 bytes = 1 GB) short of a TB, or 99 GB short if you insist on using GB of only 10^9 bytes. Or in marketingspeak, that's like 10 movies less than promised. And this is presumably RAM, which really really should be measured in base 2 instead of base 10. This is one of the reasons computer scientists bitch about the dueling numbering systems; back when every byte counted, base 10 was a few bytes short, and now when bulk counts, base 10 is pushing 10% short.

Anyone know what type of memory this is?

[frovingslosh]

OK, I've done the RTFM, and I've read most of the posted comments here too. But I can't find the answer to the most basic question of all, just what type of memory is this? Is it some sore of flash memory? Is it volatile RAM, and if RAM is it Static or Dynamic and what is it's access speed (also worth knowing if it is some sort of flash RAM). And of course that includes all of the other related technical data, like how how many read/write cycles it can survive. I can't get too excited about thinking this might show up in a computer in my lifetime unless there is some technical discussion about what kind of hardware this really is.

Re:Attention Windows Clickarounds

[Anonymous Coward]

C:\>head -n 1000000 /dev/random > Windows.com
'head' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
WTF?! It's not working. I tried rebooting, but I got the same problem. Not even running as Administrator helped.
Can you please give me head? You can email me at AnonymousCoward@aol.com.
Also, I'd like to know how you know so much about me, and why you're using my name, and give me some Photoshop tips while you're at it.

And here is the data sheet for it

[Concerned Onlooker]

http://www.national.com/rap/files/datasheet.pdf

Jonny Mnemonic II

[Boawk]

In other news today scriptwriters working on the sequel of the wildly successful Jonny Mnemonic scrambled to incorporate the technical advance into the sequel's script. Now, Jonny's nail polish is sacrificed to accomodate the large amount of valuable data.

This makes for a remake of the greatest movie ever

[marqs]

Finaly I can look forward to Johnny Mnemonic 2. Only this time he stores the information in his nails.

Porn

[Fengpost]

It is weird that I have not seen a post about p0rn yet!

I just want to know...

[nut]

How stable is it,

and how fast is it?

Re:Attention Windows Clickarounds

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised every time I see just how much sexual frustration slashdotters tend to build up

fun spec sheets

[reiisi]

The one I'n still looking for (lost my copy) is the darkness emitting arsenic diode.
 

Ni-MgO

[Torodung]

Ni-MgO.

Yeah. I read that as Mi-go. Go figure. I guess I just want my brain cylinder to be full of these chips.

Back to sleep, for now. ;^)

--
Toro

Beowulf.pt

[Anonymous Coward]

About time I can finally have a decent stash of portable pr0n on my wallet.

"Could hold"

[Anonymous Coward]

no chip has been created, this is still lab science

Re:"Could hold"

[Darth Snowshoe]

"North Carolina State University engineers have created a new material that would allow a fingernail-size computer chip to store the equivalent of[...]" says the NCSU news item, first line. The execrable ComputerWorld article starts out "Engineers have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold[...]" I hate this kind of lazy, irresponsible journalism!

Do not try to purchase the chip...

[sourICE]

Do not try to purchase the chip. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth...

What truth?

There is no chip.

Reminds me of the old joke...

[sherpajohn]

IBM invented a storage device with infinite capacity, problem was seek times were forever!