Table Salt Could Help Boost HDD Storage Density By a Factor of 5

hypnosec writes "A team of researchers has managed to boost storage density on traditional magnetic platters as high as 3.3 terabits per square inch using a technique that relies on NaCl — table salt. (Comparatively, a recent 4TB Seagate drive had an areal density of 625Gb per square inch.) A research team used a technique called nanopatterning to create arrays of magnetic bits that have more regular features (PDF) than the current traditional, randomly distributed technique. Team leader Joel Yang compares the technique to a well known traveling trick; 'It's like packing your clothes in your suitcase when you travel. The neater you pack them the more you can carry.' Yang said, 'In the same way, the team of scientists has used nanopatterning to closely pack more of the miniature structures that hold information in the form of bits, per unit area.'"

Comments

Does it boost my memory too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it boost my memory too? Maybe I should eat some more.

Re:Does it boost my memory too?

[jellomizer]

It may if the Hypertension doesn't kill you.

Re:Does it boost my memory too?

[dogmatixpsych]

Hypertension will destroy your memory if it doesn't kill you so salt certainly won't help. :)

Re:Does it boost my memory too?

[dontmakemethink]

Actually, yes. Your brain needs electrolytes to function properly. Doesn't mean you should eat more, but you might not be getting enough.

Re:Does it boost my memory too?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

HyperTension? Is that a new feature in Intel processors?

Re:Does it boost my memory too?

[bberens]

These days you really have to go out of your way to *not* eat more than the recommended daily intake of salt.

Re:Does it boost my memory too?

[Khyber]

Only if you don't cook at home.

1400 calorie diet, not much sodium, healthy, skinny, and pretty good in memory areas, minus that one area damaged from being DEAD for more than half an hour from a car accident.

Re:Does it boost my memory too?

[Bucky24]

That's just what they told you. You're actually a zombie now.

Metaphors

[uigrad_2000]

It's like packing your clothes in your suitcase when you travel. The neater you pack them the more you can carry.

Dr. Yang continued. "For speciality file systems, imagine you are travelling for a wedding, and you need to pack a suit. The extra meta data for the file system is stored in a container much like the suit compartment of your luggage."

Unfortunately, the metaphor did not stop there.

"Data read times have been improved also. Imagine again that the suitcase is packed neatly, but this time all clothes are on their sides. Now, imagine the suitcase is being spun in an x-ray device by the TSA. The tighter packing allows them to see more of what is packed in the suitcase during each arc of 30 degrees."

The rest of the conversation has been edited out, but it related seek times to finding shoes that match your outfit.

Re:Metaphors

[idontgno]

I see that yet again, Dilbert has pioneered critical storage technologies.

Re:Metaphors

[MozeeToby]

The whole time I was reading the analogy I was expecting him to finish with "That is a very graphic analogy which aids understanding wonderfully while being, strictly speaking, wrong in every possible way." With apologies to Sir Pterry.

Re:Metaphors

[nabsltd]

The rest of the conversation has been edited out, but it related seek times to finding shoes that match your outfit.

This post makes me feel like I'm reading a Douglas Adams book. Well done.

Re:Metaphors

[Megane]

Sorry, this is Slashdot. We use automotive analogies here. Does it have anything to do with melting ice on bridges?

Re:Metaphors

[rossdee]

Here they use salt on other parts of the road, not just bridges. (of course by the time the plow truck has got down our end of the street its just about run out of the salt/sand mixture. - and Sodium Chloride doesnt do well when its below 0F

Re:Metaphors

[Joce640k]

Whoah, dude. You can quote Dilbert back to 1993?

Re:Metaphors

[TheLink]

Seriously though, when I pack for travelling I roll up my clothes tightly but I don't twist them. That way they aren't really creased (in fact they are less creased than if I folded them "neatly")

Sometimes if I need more space I stuff the rolled up clothes in a plastic bag, and use a vacuum cleaner to suck some air out of the bag (to squeeze stuff more) - but you shouldn't do this if you might not have access to a vacuum cleaner for repacking and you won't have extra space (given away gifts, used consumables etc). Also be aware that the luggage compartments in many planes isn't pressurized so... ;)

Re:Metaphors

[wintercolby]

Okay, so imagine you're a car dealer... if you have a parking lot full of cars parked at haphazard angles, then you won't be able to fit as many in . . . but if they're all at 30 degrees from the customer service entrance, then you'll fit at least 3 times as many cars into the parking lot and you can use a pair of binoculars to do your inventory.

Re:Metaphors

[Anonymous Coward]

They used some crazy chemical here a couple years ago, it had a bluish tint. I don't know what the hell it was called, but it didn't work for shit and turned the roads into a skating rink. We were right back to the salt/sand the next season. I'm betting someone in the DoT got their walking papers for that one LOL

Re:Metaphors

[datavirtue]

You have not worked in government have you? People do not get fired for mistakes, they get promoted--seriously.

Re:Metaphors

[Anonymous Coward]

Aeroplane luggage compartments are certainly pressurised (and heated), otherwise you'd have lots of exploding cans of hairspray, shaving cream and the like, not to mention dead dogs.

Re:Metaphors

[Khyber]

Some of us can quote Dilbert even further than that.

I still have something from 89 when it first came out.

Re:Metaphors

[Bucky24]

This is the infamous comic strip that offended a real-life person with the surname "Dork."

Poor guy....

Re:Metaphors

[PopeRatzo]

They used some crazy chemical here a couple years ago, it had a bluish tint.

Oh, that wasn't for the roads. It was actually a truckload of crystal meth that had somehow been fouled with VeryBerry Koolaid. Because of the ice on the roads, the 1993 Ford van that was carrying the meth skidded into a tree, popping the back doors open and spilling the meth all over the road.

A man driving a small SnowCat that was helping pull stranded motorists out of ditches on that stormy night happened to notice the meth spill and rushed to use the small backloader that he had mounted (poorly, because though he was a maker, he wasn't a very good one) on the front of the Cat to scoop up as much of the meth as possible so he could bring it back to his trailer, bag it up and along with his girlfriend, a night dispatcher at the local sheriff's department, sell it to high school kids and unemployed folks in the area. The unemployed folks were especially good customers, trading the balance on their food stamp cards for bags of meth.

So anyway, the guy driving the SnowCat sped back to his trailer and was too busy thinking about the new PS/3 and HighDef TV he was going to buy with the proceeds to notice that the wind was blowing most of the meth all over the road, spreading a thin layer of high-test speed throughout his route through the town. When he got home, he noticed the backloader was empty except for a little residue, which he quickly scraped up and smoked while he packed his bags for the trip he was going to take to Chicago, where he became a grad-student in English. He would later become a Professor of Literary Theory and bump into a young lecturer on campus who would later become President of the United States. Anyway, the local sheriff's office followed the trail of crystal meth to the man's trailer, but his (now ex-) girlfriend, who it turns out had been banging the chief deputy as well, intervened in order to keep the man's name (and hers) out of what would certainly be a big news story.

I know this all because...I am the man who was driving the SnowCat that night.

By the way, I know this is a little off-topic but that game, Rage? When I first played it, I was kind of disappointed because although the combat mechanics are pretty damn good, the game itself is just another post-apocalyptic romp with invisible walls where the developers don't want you to go. However (and this is really the point of my post) if you have a couple of glasses of nice vodka with blueberry juice the game is a fucking blast. But you have to drink enough so that you start to get that sort of echoey sound in your ears and your fingers start to feel a little tingly, right?

Anyway, I've got to get back to the game now. Have a good evening everyone.

Re:conspiracy

[Anonymous Coward]

I know very few people who buy a new hard drive every year.

Re:conspiracy

[Zen-Mind]

Companies don't force anyone, people's ego does ... big difference. Stop defining yourself by what you own, but by who you are and you should be fine :P

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

..., does it make data storage more palatable, or should the claim be taken with a pinch of salt... :)

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

A grain of salt you dumb mother fucker!

briny

[vencs]

Expected the TFA to have any detail about read/write speeds - something that one would expect about a HDD (not a lame suitcase analogy). Higher densities on platters often resulted in slower IO speeds as the heads proved not to be that precise in deciding whether a bit was set or not and so ends up in verifying the data using some ECC type mechanisms. May be the real motivation is to say that disk is the new tape.

Re:briny

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, maybe in opposite land.

In the past Increased densities have always resulted in increased speed because the amount of data that can be fed to the heads per unit of distance is increased.

Re:briny

[TheRaven64]

An increase in linear read speed, anyway. Hard drive random seek times haven't seen much change since the '80s. Densities have improved by a factor of over a million while seek times have improved by a factor of less than two.

Re:briny

[camperdave]

An increase in linear read speed, anyway. Hard drive random seek times haven't seen much change since the '80s. Densities have improved by a factor of over a million while seek times have improved by a factor of less than two.

This is why we need to ditch the spinning disk and go to completely solid state storage techniques.

Important note:

[Baloroth]

Do not try this at home. Pouring table salt on your hard drive platters will not improve their storage density.

Re:Important note:

[Anonymous Coward]

But it makes them more delicious

Re:Important note:

[EdZ]

It will, however, significantly improve their flavour. Unseasoned glass substrate platters are particularly unappetising.

Re:Important note:

[Overzeetop]

You don't know that. How could you, since it will likely make them unreadable. For all you know, you may have increased the available density by more than 5X. The heads would simply not be able to read them. ;-)

Re:Important note:

[Jeng]

Whenever the subject comes to data density I recall Heinlein take on this.

Basically you can take a match stick, and put a single mark on it. The distance between the mark and the end of the stick is the data being recorded. The higher precision the larger amount of data being recorded. With high enough precision a single mark could contain all the information that mankind has ever produced.

Re:Important note:

[Anonymous Coward]

TLDR; I managed to fit only a little amount of table salt through the tiny holes that were covered by stickers, but my HD doesn't seem to be any faster.

Re:Important note:

[Anubis IV]

You don't know that. How could you, since it will likely make them unreadable. For all you know, you may have increased the available density by more than 5X. The heads would simply not be able to read them. ;-)

I just tried that with my PS3, and I think your theory may be correct. It doesn't turn on, but I get a sense that the density has increased by roughly 500%. I also get a sense that I need to buy a new PS3. I'll definitely try to transfer the HDD over to the new one!

Re:Important note:

[gnasher719]

Basically you can take a match stick, and put a single mark on it. The distance between the mark and the end of the stick is the data being recorded. The higher precision the larger amount of data being recorded. With high enough precision a single mark could contain all the information that mankind has ever produced.

You just re-invented arithmetic coding. Any file can be represented as a single real number between 0 and 1, as long as you have enough precision.

Re:Important note:

[interval1066]

Took me a minute becuase the article was very difficult for me to read (navy font against a lighter blue background, brilliant) but all they did was add table salt (in aqueous solution I'm sure) to the developing chemicals in the etching process. That's interesting from a chemistry persepective; it implies they may be able to even higher densities by fiddling around with that catalyst- in stead of salt maybe they add shrimp cocktail to the process and get peta byte capacities or something.

Re:Important note:

[sakdoctor]

The information density is still limited by quantum gravity, which predicts discreteness of space-time at the Planck length scale.

Re:Important note:

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

That's not true. The number of marks you have after you write it is itself information. You'd be writing infinite data on a match stick!

(Sorry, I've had a terrible week programming.)

Re:Important note:

[Anonymous Coward]

What did my sysadmin always say about taking care of my hard drives?

Never put salt in your hard drive. Never put salt in your hard drive. Never put salt in yoNever put salt in yoNever putNever putNeverNeverNeNeNe

Always put salt in your hard drive.

Re:Important note:

[RoverDaddy]

No petabytes, because peta would object to the exploitation of shrimp.

Re:Important note:

[Anonymous Coward]

Heisenberg uncertainty principle limits how well localized the mark can be, given that the momentum of the mark is small. Also, thermal effects will perturb the mark position.

Re:Important note:

[falzer]

If my math is right, Planck's length as your resolution limit gives you 6.187x10^34 possible marking positions per meter of stick, which means you can encode about 115 bits with one mark on a 1m Planck-grade stick.

Re:Important note:

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it possibly 'chip' the platter??

Re:Important note:

[insertwackynamehere]

Thanks. I nearly choked to death on my Qdoba you fucking dick

Re:Important note:

[IorDMUX]

If my math is right, Planck's length as your resolution limit gives you 6.187x10^34 possible marking positions per meter of stick, which means you can encode about 115 bits with one mark on a 1m Planck-grade stick.

Not quite. You can record one 115 bit value, which is very different from 115 bits. a 115 bit value has 2^115 = 42 million billion billion billion (10^34) bits of information.

A slight difference.

Re:Important note:

[Anonymous Coward]

No petabytes

NOOOOO! How will we save petafiles?

Re:Important note:

[drinkypoo]

Do not try this at home. Pouring table salt on your hard drive platters will not improve their storage density.

That depends on which definition of the word "areal" you use.

Re:Important note:

[Anonymous Coward]

If you encode the bits that small, how do you know where they are?

Re:Important note:

[psnINsplPL]

Do not try this at home. Pouring table salt on your hard drive platters will not improve their storage density.

What about if you microwave it afterwards... You know, to improve the molecular alignment?

Re:Important note:

[JesseMcDonald]

You can record one 115 bit value, which is very different from 115 bits.

No, storing one arbitrary 115-bit value is exactly equal to storing 115 bits. The relationship is one-to-one:

8-bit value: 10110110 (181/255 ~= 0.713 units)
8 bits: 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0

Re:Important note:

[artor3]

No, he had it right. There are ~6(10^34) = 2^115 marking positions. You mark one of them. That means you can select one value out of 2^115.

If I let you pick one value out of 2^10 = 1024, would you say that you have 10 bits of data or 1024 bits of data?

Or, to make it even easier, if I let you pick one value out of 2^0 = 1 (as in, you have to pick the number one and have no other option), is that zero bits of data or one?

Re:Important note:

[IorDMUX]

If I let you pick one value out of 2^10 = 1024, would you say that you have 10 bits of data or 1024 bits of data?

Well, actually, in my world of mixed signal and ADC design, we would refer to the resolution of the data as 10-bit. i.e. a 10 bit value. That 10 bit value can represent 1024 unique possibilities, or 1024 least-significant-bits (or, as we say, "bits") of data. For example, if our 10-bit ADC has 10 bits of error, then it is only a 1 % error.

Maybe it's an industry nomenclature thing. *shrug*

Re:Important note:

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's an industry nomenclature thing. *shrug*

More likely you have no idea what we're talking about here.

Re:Important note:

[nedlohs]

Except that quantum mechanics don't stop arithmetic encoding from working.

Re:Important note:

[Khyber]

Thanks. My fingers nearly tripped and spelled 'Adobe' while trying to search what Qdoba was. Damned muscle memory dyslexia!!

Re:Important note:

[martin-boundary]

You're confused. 1024 possibilities is exactly the same as 10 yes/no questions. It takes 10 questions to find one value among 1024, using binary search.

So even though 2^115 is a big decimal number, that number represents only 115 independent yes/no questions. Or put another way: if you have 115 yes/no answers, and you want to represent them as a single symbol, then you'll need a huge number of symbols to handle all the possibilities, 2^115 different symbols, in fact.

Re:Important note:

[IorDMUX]

I believe I understand what you are saying... After all, your binary search is my successive approximation ADC

But I don't see how that disagrees with my previous point.

Re:Important note:

[martin-boundary]

In your previous points on this thread, you've repeatedly used "bits" incorrectly. A bit is the smallest unit of information. It represents an atomic yes/no question, a single truth value in logic, etc. When you have 2^10 different values, those 1024 values aren't bits. 1024 is only the size of the range of a 10-bit number.

In your ADC example, the bits are the actual 0/1s in the approximation, but the bits are not the waveform approximation itself. That's an actual signal intended to recreate the input signal. The logic flow that's used to make the approximate waveform, that's pure information. And information is measured in units of bits (it can also be measured in other units, eg trits 0/1/2, or nats, etc).

The logic flow is therefore a collection of bits - namely the sequence of zeros and ones that occur in a realization of the algorithm (eg like a length can be viewed as a collection of inches, or a collection of any other valid length units).

Re:Important note:

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhat relevant: use Firebug for inappropriate coloring schemes. Fix the right values (background-color, text-color... even font and size) and you get a properly colored page.

Re:Important note:

[Artifakt]

Quantization itself most certainly does stop arithmetic encoding from achieving infinite precision, The fact that the real universe seems to have a minimum length and a minimum interval is why, for just one example, storing all the information that has fallen into a black hole requires the surface area of its event horizon. For the simpler case of a matchstick, you simply cannot infinitely divide the matchstick.
1.616199(97)×10(E-35) meters is as small as things get. That's about 10(E-20) x the diameter of a proton, so not only is no known technology anywhere close to that accuracy, but even if a way was somehow found to reduce the temperature of a matchstick to incredibly near absolute zero, 'notch' a single proton, and read the information back without disturbing the length, we'd still be nowhere close.
Now, how does the universe apply physical laws, when the actual events themselves can be considered as analog computations, either of themselves or other events? Even the simplest equation, such as F=ma, will sometimes produce numbers that are infinite non-repeating decimals (or whatever base the universe uses). The universe doesn't have infinite registers to store those numbers, ergo the real events are only approximate calculations, and the universe, if viewed as a gigantic computer as some people have suggested, fudges its maths.

Re:Important note:

[nedlohs]

Arithmetic encoding isn't marking the length of something and hence running into the planck length rather quickly. It's just a type of compression algorithm, used in practice . I can encode video with dirac just fine thanks, withtout quantum mechanics making it not work - since arithmetic encoding isn't about measuring or marking anything.

Retention

[Zen-Mind]

Salt is now good for both water AND data rentention YAY!

SeaSaltGate?

[Bemopolis]

I haven't read the article, but the idea sounds kosher.

Good night, tip your waitresses.

Re:SeaSaltGate?

[tgd]

I haven't read the article, but the idea sounds kosher.

Good night, tip your waitresses.

I'm taking the whole thing with a grain of ...

Nevermind.

So, ...

[mpmansell]

...does it make data storage more palatable, or should the claim be taken with a pinch of salt... :)

Re:So, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

as stated previously, it's a GRAIN of salt you stupid stupid motherfucker. Now, go shoot yourself in the face.

Re:So, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends on where you're from, cockbottom.

take care

[godrik]

We should take that news with a grain of salt. One can not just spread NaCl on its hard drive and get performance kick.

Screw that

[geekoid]

I want a massive SSD capacity increase, and price drop.

Re:Screw that

[ajlitt]

Until that happens, enjoy the increasingly more garish whips the buggy drivers will be brandishing.

Limits

[CanHasDIY]

Just don't use too much, or your disks might begin retaining water...

Re:conspiracy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's clear what you're trying to say, but I'd still like to point that "what you own" and "who you are" can feed into each other.

Re:conspiracy

[0123456]

I'm sure that the HDDs manufactures were able to produce large enough disks 5 years ago, but they're slowly increasing the capacity, just to force us to buy a new disk every year.

One of the big issues is that when drives hit 2TB a lot of things broke. A traditional BIOS has a hard time booting from a >2TB drive and older operating systems couldn't handle the 4kB sectors either... even if they could build 4TB drives there wasn't much point when you couldn't boot from them and performance was sluggish due to bad partition alignment.

Re:conspiracy

[derGoldstein]

This used to be true with Intel in the 90's, pre-AMD. If there's no competition, there's no motivation to accelerate progress. This is a different case, however -- there is competition in the HDD business, so the motivation to out-do your competitors exists.

This doesn't mean that progress isn't being throttled, however. It's always possible that rivals within the same market are colluding, which is something that's harder to catch.

Re:conspiracy

[Jeng]

Very doubtful that all the HDD manufactures had this technology 5 years ago. If all did then one of them would have used it to try to gain an advantage over the others.

Now if only one did, and they were the leader in the field, then yes plausible.

electron beam lithography

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like they have found a neat way to improve resolution when patterning with e-beam lithography. But, honestly, hard drive media is probably the worst application they could think of. e-beam is so slow, it doesn't matter how small you can make features, if it takes months to years to pattern a single platter, it just won't work.

Re:electron beam lithography

[Calos]

Came here to say exactly this. e-beam is a dead end, it's simply not manufacturable. They have to write every single stinkin' bit on in the whole harddrive individually and serially.

The more interesting part, I think, is discussing why they're exploring this: they're trying to reduce bit size by utilizing a single magnetic particle per bit, instead of several. Sounds like standard litho with pitch doubling or tripling or quadrupling might be able to get the dimensions required. But that's a long, expensive process to develop, compared to e-beam, which is just litho.

Sounds more like they tackled an easy problem on their way to getting to what they really want to investigate, really.

Potential positives?

[JabrTheHut]

This probably won't happen, but:

If it drives up the price of salt then it may spur desalination projects making more drinkable water available. It might make desalination cheaper, and help increase the world's water supply. However, you'd need to use truly huge quantities of salt for that to happen.

Re:Potential positives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you any idea of the cost of salt these days? It's almost free.

Re:Potential positives?

[Reverand Dave]

As salt is one of the most plentiful minerals on the planet and such a small amount of the overall salt produced is due to desalinization, I doubt your prediction will ever happen.

Re:Potential positives?

[Anonymous Coward]

...If it drives up the price of salt then it may spur desalination projects making more drinkable water available. It might make desalination cheaper, and help increase the world's water supply. However, you'd need to use truly huge quantities of salt for that to happen.

OMG. I can't wait for the "recycle your salt" rants to begin.

" NaCl — table salt"

[NevarMore]

Whats the chemical formula for driveway salt? Kosher salt? Sea salt?

Imagine how much we could store in the big granules of road salt when winter rolls around!

Re:" NaCl — table salt"

[jellomizer]

Well driveway salt can have a lot of different formula.

NaCl - Standard Cheap Rock Salt
KCl - Safety Salt
CaCl2 - Quick Melt Salt

Re:" NaCl — table salt"

[drinkypoo]

Whats the chemical formula for driveway salt? Kosher salt? Sea salt?

Driveway salt is poorly purified, and kosher salt can also be sea salt but in practice is oddly processed, fairly pure NaCl which has a blessing tax, but sea salt is different from table salt, which is often not simply NaCl either.

Re:" NaCl — table salt"

[davewoods]

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure TFA was talking about using salt in the chemical mix required to manufacture the platters... As apposed to writing data to actual grains of salt.

Re:" NaCl — table salt"

[psnINsplPL]

Whats the chemical formula for driveway salt? Kosher salt? Sea salt?

Driveway salt is poorly purified, and kosher salt can also be sea salt but in practice is oddly processed, fairly pure NaCl which has a blessing tax, but sea salt is different from table salt, which is often not simply NaCl either.

Driveway salt will be for the no-name-company cheapo drives.

Re:" NaCl — table salt"

[Jeremy Erwin]

In my experience, Kosher Salt is a coarse salt that's especially useful for Koshering meats-- the removal of liquid blood through osmosis. Bakers sometimes prefer it, because the coarse grains can be visually distinguished from grains of sugar.

Now, go forth, and desiccate!

Patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone quick . . . get a patent table salt . . .and method of neat suitcase packing.

Re:Patents

[wintercolby]

Someone quick . . . get a patent table salt . . .and method of neat suitcase packing.

Don't for get to patent the part about putting a storage device developed with this technology in a computer.

Please, This is a Geek Site

[avandesande]

Would it have killed you to call it sodium chloride in your summary and skip over the table salt thing?

Re:Please, This is a Geek Site

[codemaster2b]

Table salt has a 1:1 correlation to sodium chloride. Therefore no additional information is conveyed using the chemical name. While I appreciate your desire to be geeky, may I point out that "table salt" is 33% more efficient at conveying the intended information?

Re:Please, This is a Geek Site

[Anonymous Coward]

but 250% less efficient than NaCl

Re:Please, This is a Geek Site

[epine]

While I appreciate your desire to be geeky, may I point out that "table salt" is 33% more efficient at conveying the intended information?

Tell that to my Himalayan salt or my Mediterranean sea salt, both of which imply unspecified exotic trace elements. I'm not quite so willing to energize on white bread custom as to equate the two. For brevity, I keep a shaker of NaCl.

Re:Please, This is a Geek Site

[AdamHaun]

Tell that to my Himalayan salt or my Mediterranean sea salt, both of which imply unspecified exotic trace elements.

They're the same trace elements as all unprocessed salt -- minerals that were also dissolved in the ocean. I ran across a site that claimed Himalayan salt has 84 elements, although that's impossible without including some toxic and/or radioactive ones. The claim seems to be based on a lab report that lists 84 elements, many of which are not present in detectable quantities in the salt.

[I was in a bad mood one day and ran across the stuff at Whole Foods. It prompted me to do some research.]

Re:Please, This is a Geek Site

[Anonymous Coward]

My table salt also has some iodine in it.

Re:Please, This is a Geek Site

[avandesande]

Exactly. You can't use table salt for photographic processes because the iodine poisons the emulsions. I doubt they would want iodine in something that goes into hard drive platters either!

Re:Please, This is a Geek Site

[avandesande]

Table salt is inappropriate for almost all chemical processes because of additives and impurities.

Re:Please, This is a Geek Site

[Anonymous Coward]

But Table Salt has more of an impact than just saying sodium chloride.
"Something that is sitting there, right on your table, can magnify bit storage on a platter significantly."
"hey this random chemical that some of you may or may not know can increase storage!"

Not everyone is a chemist here, remember. While Sodium Chloride is one of the most well known chemicals, that isn't the point.
Plus, It helps external readers too who may or may not frequent the site.

Besides, they already mentioned NaCl in addition to table salt. Best of both worlds IMO.
WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?! SOME TEA AND BICCIES? AGH

Re:Please, This is a Geek Site

[afabbro]

Table salt has a 1:1 correlation to sodium chloride.

Some of us like to get some potassium in our "table salt".

Re:Please, This is a Geek Site

[Algae_94]

I don't think you need to be a Chemist to know what NaCl is. In fact, if you don't know what it is, you are either very young and haven't learned it, a complete idiot, or the modern school systems are a complete joke. Perhaps seeing "NaCl" in the summary would spur someone who is unaware of what it is to actually try to learn something and look it up.

Re:Please, This is a Geek Site

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, what is sodium anyway? Natrium?

This is one story...

[Anubis IV]

This is one story that I'll be taking with a grain of salt.

buh-dum-TISH

Hey, scientists, it's *us* ...

[Provocateur]

Hey fellas, it's us. You can tell us that one of you was having his lunch at his desk and spilled some of the salt from his salt packets onto some of your test disks. And actually tried to pass it off as 'more experiments'. He could have put the devices out of the way but naaaa. Anyway, win-win, right? (Oh, could you hand me some of the pepper, while you're publishing your results...)

So what about quasicrystals?

[wisebabo]

Does the non-repeating nature of quasicrystals help (or hurt) data storage?

Any Nobel Laureates care to reply?

Dont believe all such reports.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

All I'm sayin' is, take it with a pinch of salt.

Re:Dont believe all such reports.

[Anonymous Coward]

For the third fucking time, the saying is a GRAIN of salt you ignorant motherfucking retard.

Re:Dont believe all such reports.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be so proud of that pun, it wasn't sodium impressive.

Re:Dont believe all such reports.

[davewoods]

I can assume that by the time you have read all comments on this thread that that phrase makes you want to punch people... It is okay, me too, and I am so glad you already took care of correcting them.

And for Slashdot, I hope there are no more articles regarding anything having to do with salt.

Re:first post!

[jank1887]

you could say.... Second Post.

Re:conspiracy

[TheRaven64]

Intel in the 90's, pre-AMD

Pre-AMD? AMD was created because IBM demanded a second source for 8088 chips. They produced Intel-compatible chips from the 8086 onwards. From the 80s to the 90s there were half a dozen other companies producing x86-compatible chips. The '90s was probably the most competitive time for Intel.

Re:conspiracy

[afidel]

Let's see:
Cyrix
VIA
AMD
IBM (codesigned with Cyrix)
NexGen
Transmeta
That's all I can think of. Are you aware of any others during the 90's?

Re:conspiracy

[Nutria]

AMD was created because IBM demanded a second source for 8088 chips.

Except that AMD was formed 10 years before the 8088 existed (1979), and didn't start second-sourcing the 8088 until 1982 or 1983.

Re:conspiracy

[Nutria]

Now if only one did, and they were the leader in the field, then yes plausible.

Or they might have used this method to reduce the number of platters, thereby reducing costs (though not necessarily prices).

Re:conspiracy

[X0563511]

Always a shame when software flaws limit hardware progress :/

Degradation

[burning-toast]

Salt + Oxygen + Iron Oxide (rust).

How long will this chemical combination remain stable? Is long-term oxidation a concern here?

Re:Degradation

[jmak]

I suppose the salt only takes part in the manufacturing process, and is removed afterwards.

Re:Degradation

[imsabbel]

Do you _really_ think modern HDs use stuff as basic as Iron Oxide?

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I put some salt on my clients HDD with some fava beans and nice chianti... sector scramble

Re:conspiracy

[SomePgmr]

Sounds reminiscent of old file system type limitations. Didn't FAT16 have a 2gb partition limit? I seem to remember that there was an overlapping period when >2gb disks were out and people still had old dos systems around.

That's not data

[hackertourist]

That mark is useless without the table that tells you what each distance represents. So on that matchstick you haven't stored data, merely a hash of that data.

Re:That's not data

[emudoug42]

That mark is useless without the table that tells you what each distance represents. So on that matchstick you haven't stored data, merely a hash of that data.

Incorrect: as long as you can measure that mark as a distance with arbitrary precision you can use that to convey any amount of data. For instance, your distance could be 0.7269767679 mm, which, with a simple 1:1 dec to ascii conversion is 0.HELLO, assuming you use fractions of a millimeter for your data. See? With infinite precision comes infinite data. Infinite precision is, of course, difficult to impossible in the real world, but that's never stopped me before.

Just a spoonful of salt..

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes the harddrive get big!
      The harddrive get big!
            The harddrive get big!

Bacon Salt

[Gunnut1124]

Think of the miracles they could perform if they'd use Bacon Salt instead...

Re:conspiracy

[datavirtue]

OKI, Texas Instruments, NEC, ...

Better SSDs

[Firethorn]

I would enjoy this as well, but I fear that we're never going to see SSDs that contain more storage for less cost.

While platters are often pretty pricy glass, it's still not up there with high purity silicon wafers. In addition, you only have to deposit an even layer of magnetic material - with flash you need not just the semiconductor gates, but the paths to them.

As such, I think that hybrid drives, such as released by Seagate, will eventually dominate. For desktops, hard drives are plenty fast enough for 90% of tasks, but it'd be nice to have the other 10% addressed faster.

I wouldn't be surprised to see DRAM replaced by flash first.

Re:conspiracy

[camperdave]

One of the big issues is that when drives hit 2TB a lot of things broke. A traditional BIOS has a hard time booting from a >2TB drive and older operating systems couldn't handle the 4kB sectors either... even if they could build 4TB drives there wasn't much point when you couldn't boot from them and performance was sluggish due to bad partition alignment.

Blah, blah, blah. It's not like we haven't hit drive capacity limits before. Why do you think hard drives are partitioned? Clustering? LBA? They are all schemes to get around hardware limitations imposed on the size of hard disks.

This tech has culinary and security implications

[idontgno]

if you use the platters to cook your shredded potatoes for breakfast while computing and storing cryptographic trapdoor values, you'll discover...

<sunglasses>

your hashes are already salted.

YEEEEAAAAAAAHHH

Gonna be a slow go

[bogie]

Well at least the big price drop part. Ignoring the specifics its like wishing for Ferrari's to drop down to Accord prices. Both products perform the same basic purpose but one uses much different engineering to accomplish the same task. You can make the Ferrari engine cheaper by mass producing it, but it's just always going to be really expensive to produce no matter what. Same thing with SSDs.

Oh how I long for cheap 1TB SSD drives and Gigabyte ethernet Internet wide...

Mmmm...condiments...

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine what they'll be able to do with some Pepper and BBQ Sauce!

Re:conspiracy

[kayditty]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchip

Re:conspiracy

[Kjella]

Yep, you could tell from the laptop HDDs that bigger 3.5" HDDs were possible, because they kept getting denser while desktop HDDs were stuck at 2TB. Nobody really wanted to be the first one out to solve all the issues and educate the market.

Re:conspiracy

[Calos]

Stop ruining people's rants with simple facts and research, it's not very nice.

Yay density...

[Internetuser1248]

Don't forget, hard disk density is inversely proportional to reliability and life expectancy. I still use 40-80 gig drives that are over 10 years old for all my os drives and you know what? I never suffer data loss. This is because on a low density drive you have a significant amount of redundancy in the wear and tear of moving parts before the errors become unrecoverable. The drives basically get slower and slower as errors increase read time, but they don't fail. This leaves plenty of time to replace the drive and back up all the data when it gets too worn. Not to mention 10 year old hard disks are free. I also know many people who bought 1TB+ drives within the last year or two that have failed already, suddenly and without warning, losing all their data. I sometimes wonder what it would be like if all the modern techniques that have been discovered were put to use making reliable 200gb drives that can run constantly for decades. surely there would be a market for that among people with precious data, sure raid is a better solution but sometimes you want a double layer of reliability. One thing is for sure, will not be buying any 3.3Tb/i disks any time soon.

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll just stick with my set of RAID 0 SSD's. I plan on backing up my data in a year or so anyway.

Less than useful - it uses EBL!

[davolfman]

Honestly why does no one seem to notice the part about this where the salt is being used in a "photo" resist for Electron Beam Lithography. That's beam - as in every single surface feature needs to be drawn by a beam of electrons one at a time. The amount of time and expense that would go into the construction of even one 3.5" platter is staggering. Yes it's cool and all but only a military application or James Bond could justify it; ever. An improvement to a mass-produced technology that makes it impossible (and I do mean impossible unless someone comes up with a magical quantum mechanical wave interference pattern that forms the magnetic regions all at once or something) to mass produce is no improvement at all.