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

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

[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

[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.

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:

[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:

[RoverDaddy]

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

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:

[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: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.

This is one story...

[Anubis IV]

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

buh-dum-TISH

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:" 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: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: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: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?

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

Re:Does it boost my memory too?

[Bucky24]

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