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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."
...until I can get a decent (120GB+) sized SSD that doesn't cost as much as a new video card?
Living With a Nerd
My first PC had 4k of RAM. I should be used to this type of growth by now... but it still makes my heart race a bit when I see ever increasing memory capacity in an ever decreasing form size.
I'll tell my grandkids about my first PC and they will roll their eyes as they leave my retirement home...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
4 Terabits = 512 Gigabytes.
Somewhat misleading? Yes. Inherently false? No.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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...
Nah. If it were the hard drive industry, 4 Tb would be 500 GB.
BEGIN RANT Seriously, North Carolina State University (NCSU in Raleigh) is not the University of North Carolina (typically in reference to Chapel Hill). One is a school (that I happened to have attended twice) that focuses primarily on Engineering and Agriculture and the other is a liberal arts school down the road. Seriously, fact-check much? http://www.mse.ncsu.edu/CAMSS/bio1.html END RANT
Solid state disks could soon catch up with mechanical hard drives[...]Dr Narayan says he expects the technology overtaking traditional solid state disk technology within the next five years.
Is shape important in Solid State? It almost seems as if the article is confusing Hard Disk Drives with Solid State Drives.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
I suppose that depends on which video cards and SSDs you use.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
The technology sounds impressive, but then they just give it the kiss of death by announcing that it's five years away. Five years from now it will still be five years away, probably because while it's possible to do, no one has been able to do it in a cost-effective manner. Also if Intel can keep up with their current roadmap, they'll probably be using something close to a 10 nm process. I know that both Global Foundaries and TSMC are working on their 28 nm process (Although they are behind schedule.) so it's not inconceivable that the rest of the industry will already be at that point anyhow.
Ok my knee jerk Six-Sigma reflex has just kicked in. On the manfacturing of those defect-free crystals... and about the cost effect and scaling for "overtaking ... in 5 years..."
Ok, here is a tip:
Anytime a politician or scientist taks about 5,8, and 12 year targets there is a reason:
Two 4 year terms = 8 years; when the project falls out they can blame the canidate currently in office.
5 years = A single Term but just a touch beyond to provide an incentive for re-election because if you don't they might cancel the project
12 Year = Two terms for canidiate A and a term for his\her heir... "Don't let the evil Democrats\Republicans kill the project!"
Now last I checked more then a few grants come in at 3,5,8 and 12 year durations... I never hear things coming to fruition in 7 years, or 6 years, or 9 years, or 11 years, or 18 years, 6 months, and 3 days.
There is just something about 5, 8, and 12 they love. Which due to the frequency they cite those values implies there is some weird cosmic alignment which causes innovations to pop at those figures... or I smell 4/5 dentists approve BS.
Another one is the 20 years from now number. What is the maturity on that investment I made...
I would honestly have a lot more respect for senior scientists if they didn't spend every waking hour working on getting grant money leaving the actual work to low-paying interns and students then claiming the work as their own offering nothing more then a second hand "my team and I" comment...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
> 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.
This is /. 512GB doesn't come close.
They don't have any of that information because they don't know any of it. They only have a way IN THE LAB to put a shitload of nanodots onto a medium. They mentioned that they have no packaging (way to read or even really write data into the dots) for an actual product.
It's like Ben Franklin saying, "Okay, I've discovered electricity. Computers should be along in about five years."
Okay, it's not that bad, but I hate that five year timeline that is rarely questioned but is thrown out to lure in investors and grant money.
Slashdot should have an automatic filter that looks for the five year estimate and flags with some "fat chance" special color.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
That is why I hate this.
It reminds me of those Popular Science stores.
Or even better the one that sticks in my mind. The THOR drive from Radio Shack.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor-CD
I was so hyped by this in 1988 it sound so cool and it was only a few years away...
It never came.
On the bright side we did eventually get CD-Rs and even CD-RWs but not for a good long time after the THOR drive was announced.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Given that there's an infinite supply of ever-changing pr0n on the internet available for free, I have to wonder why anyone would bother stashing it on a local disk. It's like saving bottles of air.
Yeah, that Thor drive was some great vapor. My painful promise memory, was hologram storage. Back in 1992, I remember holding on to a hologram storage article from MacWeek that described what was supposed to be a consumer product in a year or so.
The media was the size of a credit card and they promised it would hold 100x as much as the current best hard drives of the day. It's a real shame because you just know that there was some fairly fraudulent monkey business going on to motivate guys like that to hawk something they had no chance of ever delivering, much less in the time frames they touted.
It's amazing how the same fraud is passed along by Slashdot every six months in the form of a new holographic storage device that's going to revolutionize everything. It's probably the same core of fraudsters forming new companies and recycling their same tired story to pull in new investment suckers.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
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.
I like the french word for Bytes. Octet. So there is no confusion between 4Tb and 4 To.
It's probably too late to change bytes to another word in english ;)
Either the French changed recently, or it didn't have a word for byte until recently. A byte is not strictly defined as 8 bits, it's just that the dominant architectures used 8-bit bytes. Other older architectures used other byte sizes.