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Scientist Uses Nanodots To Create 4Tb Storage Chip
arcticstoat writes "Solid state disks could soon catch up with mechanical hard drives in terms of cost and capacity, thanks to a new data-packed chip developed by a scientist at the University of North Carolina. Using a uniform array of 10nm nanodots, each of which represents a single bit, Dr. Jay Narayan created a data density of 1 terabit per square centimeter. The end result was a 4cm2 chip that holds 4Tb of data (512GB), but the university says that the nanodots could have a diameter of just 6nm, enabling an even greater data density. The university explains that the nanodots are 'made of single, defect-free crystals, creating magnetic sensors that are integrated directly into a silicon electronic chip.' Dr. Narayan says he expects the technology overtaking traditional solid state disk technology within the next five years."
They have microdots at a 4Tb-per-sq-inch storage density; they don't have any controller that can read and write it.
This has been "accomplished" numerous times with holographic storage media before. They just never made the read-writers...
I suppose that depends on which video cards and SSDs you use.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
> Why the hell they would measure in Tb instead of GB is beyond me though.
Because each dot stores one bit. They are building chips with arrays of dots, not complete hard drives.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Problem is most software developers and OS makers also race to consume that memory. Honestly all the software today is a bloated blob that is horribly unoptimized for speed and efficiency.
It's disgusting how bloated most stuff is because we have 4gig of ram and 2 2.5ghz processors... why make it leand and mean? it compiles, ship it.
Sounds like a reasonable outcome of a cost/benefit analysis. Since when is efficiency an end in itself?
It may be peaking soon though. 6nm is getting close to physical maximums for most techniques due to the casimir effect.
Not quite sure what the Casimir Effect has to do with magnetic dots, but I should mention that 6 nm is below the Superparamagnetic limit (which is typically tens of nanometers). That means you're magnetic nanodot probably isn't magnetic.
... Which brings me to my second point: This article says nothing about what this researcher actually did. It sounds like he just fabricated an array of nanodots, which is nothing particularly groundbreaking.
Does anyone have a link to the original abstract for the conference presentation? The dots must have been multilayer "stacks", otherwise there's a good chance they won't be ferromagnetic (there's a "superparamagnetic limit" that stops ferromagnetic particles from being ferromagnetic when they get around this size.)
Lastly, the article says they'll look at housing and using "laser technology" to read back from these nanodots. They mention that as a sidenote, but it's really the most important problem if you want to make something useful. The problem with most nanomagnetic memory techniques is that reading/writing is either impractical or not yet possible.