Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Working on Liquid Battery That Could Last For Over 10 Years (engadget.com)
Jon Fingas, writing for Engadget: If Harvard researchers have their way, you may not have to worry about replacing power backs quite so often. They've developed a flow battery (that is, a battery that stores energy in liquid solutions) which should last for over a decade. The trick was to modify the molecules in the electrolytes, ferrocene and viologen, so that they're stable, water-soluble and resistant to degradation. When they're dissolved in neutral water, the resulting solution only loses 1 percent of its capacity every 1,000 cycles. It could be several years before you even notice a slight dropoff in performance. The use of water is also great news for both the environment and your bank account. As it's not corrosive or toxic, you don't have to worry about wrecking your home if the battery leaks -- you might just need a mop.
It seems every 6 months I'm turning on the news to witness another "breakthrough" in energy storage that never seems to make it to the consumer market or anywhere else. Wake me when there's a product I can somehow use in my daily life.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
They don't make money if you're not replacing your batteries all the time.
How dense is the energy storage? If the equivalent of a D-cell would be bigger than a breadbox then limited usefulness.
Ferroce isn't harmeless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and viologen isn't a nice substance either http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/ca...
Promises in advanced batteries are borderline worthless. Everyone has a superior battery.....that they can't deliver one. /Sakti3/ Sumitomo low-temp molten , etc.
Ambri / Sadoway "dirt-cheap, made from dirt" / Japan Power Dual-carbon / Phinergy's aluminum-air
Hal's Battery Blog has notes on battery announcements going back years. Many, many promises, not many tangible advances.
https://halsbatteryblog.wordpr...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
One more press release about a laboratory demonstration with an undefined time to market.
Just about zero technical details, why did I click on it?
Haven't we had enough of this stuff, Slashdot?
Not sure if it's paywalled...
It seems that they're claiming energy densities of ~20Wh/L; wikipedia quotes 250-676 Wh/L for lithium-ion, however, TFA is referring to a flow cell, so it's a bit apples and oranges...but as far as using one of these in your phone, don't hold your breath.
Anything that doesn't have enough energy to go boom if the contents are spilled/mixed/come in contact while charged won't have enough energy to power whatever portable device I'm likely to be using. I would check to see that the energy density is low, but there isn't a single link to the actual research in the article, nor to even the researchers name, just "Harvard Researchers." This article would get a failing grade in a 3th grade science fair. It's no wonder people believe lies when you can just post anything in an article on the internet and not bother with even a single source.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
These batteries can only be used by diabetic mice with induced Alzheimer's. That's how it always works.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
As it's not toxic it should be safe to drink it? Maybe it's going to replace red bull.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
Great news but I live in Canada. Any battery tech needs to be testing at -30 Celsius before I care.
Is the interior of your igloo usually that cold? I doubt that very much.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Great news but I live in Canada. Any battery tech needs to be testing at -30 Celsius before I care.
And I live in Texas where we need to survive at nearly 90 Celsius when leaving a phone in your car in August...
Between you and I, That's quite the temperature range...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Water doesn't tend to be the problem in aqueous solutions. The fact that it's a solution means that you've got these other chemicals in your water if it spills. I doubt anything that stores a high amount of charge is something you want to casually mop up while the kids and pets lap it off the floor.
Is the interior of your igloo usually that cold? I doubt that very much.
No but the exterior often is in the winter and that's usually where the car spends most of its time. Plus who wants a mobile which will not work outside half the year?
I think you're just ignoring the breakthroughs that have been happening.
It's only about 15 years since a laptop was 1.5" thick, weighed 5lb, and had an amazing 2 hour battery life. In only a decade and a half the amount of energy that's been packed into a laptop battery has increased enormously.
This is also hugely visible when you look at power tools. I cordless power drill from 15ish years ago would almost certainly us NiCd batteries, with a life of only an hour or two. Modern power drills will last a full day or more with a battery pack that's substantially smaller, and that charges in a far shorter amount of time.
And perhaps 130 years from now, someone will find a way to encapsulate or solidify the electrolyte to prevent spillage or evaporation. Maybe they'll call it a dry cell.
This may explain why my wife is by herself in the bedroom way more than she was a decade and a half ago.
#DeleteFacebook
He said Canada, not USA.
#DeleteFacebook
Ah but with a liquid battery they might be doing that a lot especially in cars because I expect replacing the liquid is a very fast way to charge it.
90C in a car? Are you sure you didn't mess up with the conversion? Only 10C more and you're boiling water.
#DeleteFacebook
From what I've read on Slashdot a few months ago, the only tech that has a chance of getting outside the lab is robots. But they get captured again a few hours later.
#DeleteFacebook
Don't forget it's mixed up with water and also with electrolytes, which are both safe - even for plants.
#DeleteFacebook
That's curious. Viologens tend to be substantially toxic. An example of a viologen is the herbicide paraquat. of which, it only takes 25mg/Kg to kill the average dog.
There is already a very simple solution to this: don't fucking live in Canada. If you insist on living in Canada and rolling the dice with a third world socialist healthcare system, then store your batteries underground below the frost line and you will not have to worry about it. But seriously, move.
Hate to break it to you, but USA is behind Canada when it comes to health care. We are #37 and Canada is #30.
This is from WHO:
http://thepatientfactor.com/canadian-health-care-information/world-health-organizations-ranking-of-the-worlds-health-systems/
Yeah, we suck. We just think we are better than everyone else because we never go anywhere else.
Actually you would probably want it to work down to -50C since -30C is not the extreme low just the typical low for a week or two most winters. Going below -40C is not uncommon for a day or two every few years so -50C should be relatively safe unless you live up in the territories.
Fake news! Fake news! The WHO is Chinese communist plot to destroy the straight, WASP American family! /s
In fact plants crave it.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Be it a battery, gasoline or plastic explosives, any time you pack a lot of energy into a small space, there is some risk of the energy being rapidly released. You can make it safer, but not 100% safe.
Hard to get a battery with a huge storage density that truly isn't somewhat dangerous. A lot of energy in a small space tends to look like a bomb.
It seems every 6 months I'm turning on the news to witness another "breakthrough" in energy storage that never seems to make it to the consumer market or anywhere else.
You should work on being less oblivious to reality. Over the last decade, batteries have become far cheaper, higher capacity, and more reliable. This progress was the result of those "breakthroughs" that you read about.
It seems every 6 months I'm turning on the news to witness another "breakthrough" in energy storage that never seems to make it to the consumer market or anywhere else.
That's because there are many obstacles to making a successful battery. So basically, depending on the technology you are working with, you may need about 10 or 20 "breakthroughs" before you get a new type of battery on the market. That said, sodium batteries are on the market and they are great for storing power for your house but due to patents, VCs and assholerly in general, they are expensive.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Ferroce isn't harmeless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and viologen isn't a nice substance either http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/ca...
How come ferrocene gets a wikipedia page, but viologen has to make do with the Aldrich Chemicals page?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
No but the exterior often is in the winter and that's usually where the car spends most of its time. Plus who wants a mobile which will not work outside half the year?
These flow batteries are not for mobile phones and cars. They are for grid storage, which can be installed in a heated area.
It's only about 15 years since a laptop was 1.5" thick
If only they went back to that. I'm sick of this thin-fetish for technology.
I want a desktop replacement, not a Facebook machine.
The funnier thing is all these cheap-shit laptops designed for this very purpose can BARELY run Windows 7, never mind Windows 10!
Having to deal with craptops like that makes me feel right back in the 80s. Hell, that's an insult to computing in the 80s.
He is a little high but not much. 150-160F is very likely in texas or about 65C. I've seen local news "bake" things inside cars to demonstrate just how dangerous leaving a child in a car is in texas.
I don't let the robotic dogs for my sled come into the igloo at night so their batteries have to survive outside in very cold conditions.
That is about right, especially in a car in 40 degree (C) weather here in Texas. Put a phone on a dash, and there is a good chance it will thermal shut down after 20-30 minutes after you leave your vehicle.
Those are all incremental advancements. We haven't had any real breakthroughs like the semiconductor in decades.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
My thoughts exactly (no mod points today or I would have modded you up as insightful). But you use the term "news" when I get all of my science fiction tech improvements from Slashdot. I've seen many battery and motor announcements that just never seem to make it to the real world. Anyone remember that small extremely efficient motor that was supposedly going to make it to hybrid cars and revolutionize things? What ever happened to that? I can't even find traces of it in the Slashdot archives!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Thousands of cycles, too. A lead acid battery can be cleaned up with a mop but I wouldn't recommend using that mop to clean your floors afterwards.
moox. for a new generation.
90C in a car? Are you sure you didn't mess up with the conversion?
I doubt he was mistaken. A car parked in the sun when it's 100F(38C) can quickly surpass 170F(77C). There are a lot of places in Texas that get hotter than that.
I didn't see what the outside temperature was in this link was, but at 1:30 in the afternoon the interior temperature was 85C. They managed to bake cookies.
You should look at gaming laptops, some of them are a bit thick, but they really are true desktop replacements. https://www.asus.com/us/Notebo...
And this is the opposite - use a lot of space to store a little bit of energy. Something like 1/10,000 the energy density of gasoline or so.
Haven't we also had a ton of stories talking about how the solid batteries researchers are working are the future because they are more stable? Maybe the liquid guys and the solid guys will create an inbetween "gel" ba... oops.
That is why... I want to emigrate to New Zealand to get away from Trump instead of Canada like the everyone else. That and maple syrup, of which, even the smell of it makes me gag.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Presumably a water battery would be too bulky for a car. Even if battery used for powering car, the battery wouldn't be in the cabin so wouldn't be exposed to that heat. If battery was in engine block it could even have it's own fans, or liquid cooling to stay cool.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
This is a flow battery. The cathode and anode are dissolved in the electrolyte on opposite sides of a membrane. Current can then flow across the membrane to produce electricity. Their attraction is that because the cathode and anode are in a liquid state, you can "recharge" a battery simply by pumping out the old fluid and pumping in new fluid - just like with gasoline. No need to develop specialized machinery to remove, move around, and insert heavy block batteries. The drawback is that energy density is a lot lower than for solid batteries, consigning them (thus far) to fixed energy storage systems (e.g. battery backup for a building).
They've developed an electrolyte which doesn't degrade as readily and can last a decade. The battery does not last that long. Its cathode and anode still need to be replenished to recharge it.
"All" we have is 100GB quad-layer Blu-rays.
I bet they were once something in a lab, too.
> In the 90s and 00s we'd get monthly articles about a new optical format that would store 1TB of data using holograms and fairy dust. None of them ever made it to market. Even now all we have is 100GB quad-layer Blu-rays.
They basically turned into the Archival Disc format, which has a first-generation capacity of 300GB per disc and a second generation capacity of 1TB per disc. The problem is that they keep delaying them: they were originally supposed to launch in 2015.
In the mean time, Sony went ahead and used BDXL for their Optical Disc Archive cartridge format, which stores up to 1.5TB per cartridge by sticking a bunch of BDXL discs into the cartridge. Those have been shipping for years. Once the 300GB discs are finally available, they're expected to use them to refresh their cartridges with capacities of 3.6 TB. They're meant to compete with tape. IIRC they cost a bit more but have much better random access times, and they're still much cheaper than hard disks.
He is a little high but not much. 150-160F is very likely in texas or about 65C. I've seen local news "bake" things inside cars to demonstrate just how dangerous leaving a child in a car is in texas.
And Florida.
I used to have a car with a thermometer stuck to the dash. In the dead of Winter, it would be pegged (140 F or more). I used to leave frozen dinners on the dash when I went into the office in the morning and they'd be hot in time for lunch.
That was back when it actually got cold outside in the winter, too.
The only other country i've been to is canada and that was only for a few hours to see Niagara Falls but since 9/11 the borders have been closed so you can't even do that now without a passport.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
It's got what power plants crave.
They just need 11, no 20, no 30 million (whatever the latest number is) illegals weighing down the system.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
You should look at gaming laptops, some of them are a bit thick, but they really are true desktop replacements.
Yep, I discovered the same thing. My 5 year old laptop is at the end of it's life and I will likely be replacing with with an alienware laptop not because I'm a gamer but because I actually want an upgrade not a downgrade.
Seems like the primary point of this battery tech is getting slam-dunked by the mobile phone and personal device power crowd. It's NOT a matter of energy density (although that is a moderately important issue), but the LONGEVITY / RECHARGE CYCLES of this battery tech.
Hell, even if it is 10 times the size of current lithium tech batteries, the fact that it can survive for a DECADE of charge / discharge cycles makes it a REAL plus in the 'load levelling' supplemental power arena, especially since they won't be stressed to full discharge / recharge on a daily basis - - - which SHOULD effectively extend the useful lifespan to several decades.
It's not a question of how much power you can pack into a given volume, it's HOW LONG the battery can perform before needing replacement - - - and this tech really seems to be a contender for bulk power storage for dealing with peak demand power usage - with a very long life cycle.
Please get off the volumetric power rants, and look at the feasibility of using this type of battery, even if it takes up a lot (relatively) of space, and consider it's application as a serious long-term power load leveling technology.
Consider, also, that it is much smaller than compressed air, elevated water, or molten salt storage systems, and appears to offer much lower maintenance / support expense, since it is basically an electrical cell that probably only requires a reasonable thermal environment.
Yeah, I've made some assumptions - that may be way off base - but at least I'm NOT trying to cram this LONG-TERM, HIGH-RECYCLE, ELECTRICAL STORAGE technology into a miniaturized application (phones, laptops, watches, etc.) that it was never intended for.
redneck geek
From the original paper, it's around 20 Wh/L. Pretty low (lithium ion is ~200-700Wh/L or so), but this would be for grid storage, not phones/cars/etc.
They were once something amazing too. How long will it be before a 100 GB quad layer Blu ray disk only holds a dozen Word files, each containing the text "Hello World" ?
Similarly we need new batteries for our new toys. But new toys have outpaced batteries.
Fortunately new batteries don't have the backward compatibility constraints that optical disks have. If there are ten billion optical disks out there, it's a big deal to suddenly try to change to a new format. Not quite so much a problem with Tesla, or even Black & Decker switching to a different battery. Not totally trivial, but not nearly the problem either.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
"The use of water is also great news for both the environment and your bank account..."
The lack of corruption and greed would also be great news for capitalism, but much like a battery that lasts 10 years, we'll never see that shit happen to benefit the masses.
Don't ever fucking assume something that would last 10 years would end up being "good" for your bank account. In today's environment of overpriced disposable electronics and SaaS, promoting a long-term bargain is practically illegal.
Indeed, laboratory success appears to require significant engineering before it can be realized in products, and other challenges, such as packaging, cost reduction, etc., tend to reduce the overall effect. What we see in the market so far is incremental improvement, more like 2% at a time than the factors of 5 and 10 that are demonstrated in the lab. It's frustrating that Moore's law does not appear to apply in the energy storage world. With any luck, we'll get a factor of 3 or so before too long, and even that will be a world-changer.
I guess you don't realize that free-market is antithetical with fascism.
Keep calling everyone you disagree with a fascist. And then wonder why things don't work out.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
And have a real world lifetime of a few years. Archiving data is a tough job. Storing it in an amorphous, heat and light sensitive material is data suicide. Tape is still king here, and has decades of actual archival use to prove it's longevity. (yes, tape is subject to decay, but at levels that make optical discs look like play-dough.) I, personally, have tapes over 25 years old that are still perfectly readable. (and that's 15 years in a kitchen drawer, not the Svalbard seed vault.)
(* Note: choose your tape technology wisely. QIC-80 is known to not even survive a single full-pass write. LTO is all the rage, but it's exceedingly easy to permanently damage.)
The number of charge cycles and the capacity of batteries has been improving by 5-8 percent per year for a while.
That's slow enough that you don't notice it but 2016 batteries last 2 to 3 times as many charge cycles as 2008 batteries lasted.
For example:
300 cycles MacBook (Mid 2007)
500 cycles MacBook (13-inch Aluminum, Late 2008)
1000 cycles MacBook Pro (15-inch, Late 2016)
Capacities of the batteries have also increased similarly (if not even more). Some laptops ran off of batteries with the capacity in milliamp hours that we now run our smartphones with.
And the cost of the batteries has dropped by over 75% during the same time period.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Sure. It just wasn't a hot news item until there was actually a viable product. Batteries, unlike blu-ray constantly make the news even when there's nothing viable to show for it.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I put a temperature datalogger under some wadded up white t-shirts in the back seat of my car with the windows rolled up and left it in the parking lot at my work all day each day for a week (usually I crack the windows and put a reflector on the windshield).
The highest temp I saw was 172F (~78C).
I can't see anywhere where the researchers say "Oh, you won't be able to use this for that".
Not in TFA, but you are allowed to read other sources, and educate yourself about batteries in general and flow batteries in particular. Flow batteries are big. They use pumps and valves. They are for industrial grid scale storage, or maybe grid endpoint storage for a homeowner with solar. They ain't going in no stinkin cellphone.
What if the heaters are only turned on when people are home?
Then their water pipes will freeze and crack, and they will have a flooded basement. People who live in -30C climates don't turn the heat completely off and then go on vacation for a week. If they do, then a non-working battery will be the least of their problems.
It seems every 6 months I'm turning on the news to witness another "breakthrough" in energy storage that never seems to make it to the consumer market or anywhere else. Wake me when there's a product I can somehow use in my daily life.
Seems like you should tell us exactly what these breakthroughs were then.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Sure. It just wasn't a hot news item until there was actually a viable product. Batteries, unlike blu-ray constantly make the news even when there's nothing viable to show for it.
So I guess we should just not report promising technology? Seriously, are you people like 85 years old and pissed off about your Ni-Cad stock tanking?
I'm massively skeptical about this report, it doesn't have the ring of veracity - mostly through lack of information. But I actually want to hear about it.
I tend to lend these people more credence - http://news.mit.edu/2014/liqui... or these http://www.wbur.org/bostonomix... even if they are a little loose with the "unlimited" http://www.wbur.org/bostonomix.... A lotta stuff going on, despite what teh Slashdot denial crowd believes. Then again, maybe we need to suit up and get to the coal mines.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I think you're just ignoring the breakthroughs that have been happening.
It's only about 15 years since a laptop was 1.5" thick, weighed 5lb, and had an amazing 2 hour battery life. In only a decade and a half the amount of energy that's been packed into a laptop battery has increased enormously.
This is also hugely visible when you look at power tools. I cordless power drill from 15ish years ago would almost certainly us NiCd batteries, with a life of only an hour or two. Modern power drills will last a full day or more with a battery pack that's substantially smaller, and that charges in a far shorter amount of time.
These folks still think that we are in 15 years ago. Lawns were greener, the gaddamned teenagers stayed off of them. It's called grouchy ass syndrome.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
My thoughts exactly (no mod points today or I would have modded you up as insightful). But you use the term "news" when I get all of my science fiction tech improvements from Slashdot. I've seen many battery and motor announcements that just never seem to make it to the real world. Anyone remember that small extremely efficient motor that was supposedly going to make it to hybrid cars and revolutionize things? What ever happened to that? I can't even find traces of it in the Slashdot archives!
Sure. So what's the point? We supposed to be really pissed off? Or just not try to find breakthroughs? Or just keep the press on total lockdown until an actual breakthrough is put into successful service, a word of it getting out punishable by law if something leaks out? I mean we have a lot of people here on Slashdot who are pissed at the announcement and grousing about it. Has the technology site Slashdot been replaced by the old guys down at the Legion who hate everything? Sit at the bar, drink beer and the world's gone to hell.
This is how science and technology works. If we don't like it, they're saving a seat for y'all and the beer's cold and the conversation grouchy.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The only other country i've been to is canada and that was only for a few hours to see Niagara Falls but since 9/11 the borders have been closed so you can't even do that now without a passport.
Why would you even post bullshit like that?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Great news but I live in Canada. Any battery tech needs to be testing at -30 Celsius before I care.
And I live in Texas where we need to survive at nearly 90 Celsius when leaving a phone in your car in August...
Between you and I, That's quite the temperature range...
You figure that whatever we end up with must operate at all possible temperatures?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
FFS - are those tiny little lithium batteries with a massive charge in your phone not proof enough that there has been breakthroughs?
Did you whine "wake me up" about those a bit over ten years ago?
I'm not trying to be topper here (since the data recovery company say they do it a lot) but last year I had a few reels from the 1980s transcribed with no apparent data loss. The newer stuff is on a better plastic so is likely to last even longer.
To keep with the topic there have been some massive improvements with tape storage technology. LTO7 is 6TB per tape. That's something you don't have to handle like eggs as you need to do with a hard drive.
As this is for stationary batteries (far too low energy density for anything else), it does not matter that much.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yes, the plastic tape is better, but they pack ever more data into the same space making "bit rot" much more of a problem. The best tape tech is DLT (and SDLT) -- relatively heavy tape with laser etched tracking on the back of the tape. DAT/AIT comes in second -- VCR technology with tracking data recorded along the bottom of the tape at the same time as data. Sony used to make some very strong ("DLC") tapes. In last place is LTO -- hard drive technology applied to a tape... tracking information is stored as data on the tape in a manner that cannot be replaced in the field. (It is absolutely trivial to ruin an LTO tape. I've had dozens destroyed by Iron Mountain.)
(NASA has had data tapes from the 60s and 70s "recovered" -- the drives to read them no longer exist, and they're in a format no one remembers.)
What about buildings where the space for batteries and the heating are luxuries? What if the heaters are only turned on when people are home?
Step 1, dig hole
Step 2, install reservoir in hole, in ground contact
Step 3, enjoy constant fifty degree temperatures for your battery reservoir, year-round.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Twenty-nine years ago, I read about a breakthrough in battery chemistry that would make the common NiCd battery obsolete: the new chemistry had four times the capacity, could stand ten times as many charge-discharge cycles, and had no memory effect.
In the decade and a half that followed, I read about a number of other miracle energy-storage technologies: hydrogen, methane, methanol, and ethanol fuel cells; sodium, zinc, and lithium battery chemistries, and a number of other breakthroughs. None of them ever seemed to turn into an actual product I could buy, though.
I kept following that chemistry I first read about in 1988, seeing it pop up from time to time in uses such as electric vehicles or laptop batteries, but never in a form I could make use of. And finally, in 2003, I was able to go to a store and buy a set of those NiMH batteries to use in my digital camera.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I'm not so sure about that. For example, the 1960s tape drive used in the movie "The Dish" as a prop was a working unit that had been on display at a University in Melbourne. The procedure to recover from a very old and brittle tape on the other hand is a lot more than just putting it in the right drive.
Masterpiece of understatement. That's APPALLINGLY, knee-slapping-laughably low. 1/500 as much as diesel fuel; 1/18 as much as a flashlight battery.
I don't think I would trust a person to have a large power dense always hot corrosive filled object in their house at the moment. I think most people would treat it like their water heater and when they notice a leak just have it replaced but I'm not sure that is a good thing with a sodium-sulfur batter. They would however be good a good choice for large batteries at substations, power plants, or large power consumers where they can be properly monitored and maintained. For consumers batteries like iron-nickle ones are ideal for home power storage as they can really take abuse and neglect and still work good for decades. Remember with the general population you are dealing with people who are pretty likely to have a car battery die on them because it was the original that came with the car 10 years ago and had been showing clear signs of failure for the last 3.
Time to offend someone
The (7th gen Intel i5) Dell I bought last month costs less than the Dell it replaced from five years ago, or the Thinkpad that replaced 10 years ago (and was better than in every way.) But...
It also happens to be thinner.
This is fairly normal for the $500-1,000 range. True, if you buy something under $500 you end up with a mobile Pentium or Celeron or even an Atom, but budget laptops have never really been good desktop replacements. Conversely, if you pay more than $1,000 you're probably buying a fashion statement, not a desktop replacement.
But if you actually are serious about wanting a powerful laptop, and you're not able to find one, then you're not looking. Going to Amazon, selecting "i5" and "i7", together with a reasonable amount of memory, isn't difficult and will list huge numbers of well spec'd laptops perfectly capable of running Windows 7 or Windows 10 or Ubuntu or whatever you want.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Would the Dell XPS range not suit you better then? Since Dell bought Alienware they're practically the same thing, but without all the gamer gimmickry.
One of my goals is to be able to drive 3 displays, one of which is a 4k. Most laptop video cards only support 2 displays at a time and the lcd counts as one of them. The alienware line makes 3 displays and/or 4k easy as they sell a docking station that supports 3rd party video cards.
Normally, battery breakthrough headlines are about improvements to existing technology. Those do make it to market, but nobody ever pays attention because it's not in the marketing material. Who cares if you used a new technique in your manufacture; people just want to know how long it'll last. The headlines that are new tech often showcase stuff that'll be five or ten years out, at which point their advantages may have been erased by other new tech.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
I don't think I would trust a person to have a large power dense always hot corrosive filled object in their house at the moment
I'm speaking of a sodium-ion battery aka salt water battery. They do not have thermal issues and they a big step up from lead-acid batteries.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
And have a real world lifetime of a few years. Archiving data is a tough job. Storing it in an amorphous, heat and light sensitive material is data suicide.
That rather flies in the face of Sony's claim of 50+ year lifespans for current ODA cartridges. I understand that they're offering a 100 year warranty on the gen 2 cartridges that use AD.
I'm pretty sure that we're all LTO here though.
Hey, what about all this renewable energy? Gasoline, jet fuel, diesel biofuel? And don't forget, self-healing cement!!
I'm sure there is a lot going on. Just nothing useful to people just yet. My problem isn't really with tech reporting, it's with the reporters acting like everything is the next big thing.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I'm sure there is a lot going on. Just nothing useful to people just yet. My problem isn't really with tech reporting, it's with the reporters acting like everything is the next big thing.
That is probably the difference between the technically minded, and the crowd most of these stories are written for. Certainly with no good references, and a couple sorta keywords, it sends us on a chase that I haven't gotten to the bottom of yet. I look at the fluff articles as a starting place. The liquid flow battery the army is developing is extremely interesting, which is one thing I've found looking for this battery.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
the problem with BDXL is threefold:
1: They're expensive.
2: BDXL drives are rare and expensive, with only 2 makers left.
3: The lifespan of the discs is potentially less than a decade.
By the time you start taking that into account it's a better bargain to buy a (very expensive) LTO7 drive and feed it with (relatively cheap) 6TB capacity tapes. Or step back a generation and buy a (cheaper) LTO6 drive and (very cheap) 2.5TB tapes. (those are raw capacity, not the "compressed" claims made for them)
The only caveat with this approach is that you should ensure your environment is clean. They're somewhat dust-sensitive.
FWIW: CDRW format is _extremely_ durable, because it's not dye based.
The problem is that it's very low capacity. :(
> (It is absolutely trivial to ruin an LTO tape. I've had dozens destroyed by Iron Mountain.)
Stats please.
Iron Mountain are trying to sell their "services" to $orkplace and I've been resisting for a long time due to these kind of stories. It's getting harder and harder to veto manglement wanting to farm stuff out to them vs buying a few more data safes.
"The procedure to recover from a very old and brittle tape on the other hand is a lot more than just putting it in the right drive."
The "correct" way to preserve data is to migrate to new media as the old is replaced, not to put the old media in a corner and hope it's still readable in 20 years time.
I'm having this argument right now with a researcher who has several thousand Exabyte tapes full of astrophysics data taking up valuable storage space. My argument is that we need the space and they'd fit on a couple of LTO7s. His is that he'll never need to read them and if the drives die there's always Ebay.
There are a number of specialist recovery firms who have managed to keep old drives operational, but they don't come cheap. I've been quoted £250 a pop to recover old (1980s) NASA 9-track reels that one researcher has been storing in his garage for the last GodKnowsHowLong. He's put his ambition of restoring them all on hold after being quoted a quarter of a million pounds for the task.
Why so expensive? Simple - apart from the effort in actually restoring the tapes, wear and tear on drives with increasingly irreplacable parts is a major issue. It's easier to decode an old vinyl/shellac record with a high resolution optical scanner(*) than to try and recover old magnetic tape formats if you don't have the right heads.
(*) This has been sucessfully done to a limited extent with standard 1200dpi kit and can recover snapped or distorted records. It's actually easier to achieve than the legendary laser turntables that never hit the market.
Quoted tape lifespans are somewhat misleading.
LTO will keep for 20+ years - if used once and then put in storage.
Or the tapes will die after about 50 full write cycles (not the 162 that's claimed byt the LTO consortium)
Use them for archival OR backup purposes. Never use the same sets for both.
Now that BDXL is being used in Ultra Blu-Ray players (they're not using the name but they are using the format), is it still true that there are only two manufacturers? And there is M-Disc... expensive but they claim a much longer lifetime for the discs.
Using B&H pricing, a 3.3TB raw capacity ODA cartridge is US$188.57, while a 6TB raw capacity LTO7 tape is US$177.83.
So the ODA cartridge (which I think is Archival Disc instead of BDXL like the 1.5TB cart) is a little less than double the price per gig of LTO, but the upside is that the ODA cartridge should have a random access time of a fraction of a second while the LTO tape seek time would be maybe a minute.
Ok, I didn't know about those. I will have to read up on them. Although just about anything is a step up from lead-acid batteries as the only thing they have going for them is low cost.
Time to offend someone
NVidia showed off a 4K triple screen laptop prototype at CES this year. https://www.razerzone.com/proj...
It seems every 6 months I'm turning on the news to witness another "breakthrough" in energy storage that never seems to make it to the consumer market or anywhere else. Wake me when there's a product I can somehow use in my daily life.
Is the new battery the size of a house, or that of a swimming pool?
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
AGM batteries have been around for decades. I get right about 10 years out of mine.
I was replying to https://slashdot.org/comments....
The part that said "Yeah, we suck. We just think we are better than everyone else because we never go anywhere else."
Afaik the border is still closed.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Missed something: The ODA carts _are_ hard drives, with all the disadvantages that entails (electronics in the cartridge, susceptablity to being dropped, etc). For that reason alone I wouldn't use them in a critical backup system.
It's a /. article with "could" in the title, after all.
There are up to 30 discs in an ODA cartridge, you're not buying or touching individual BDXL discs.
Umm, Optical Disc Archive cartridges are not hard disks, they are literally a stack of optical discs in a cartridge. BDXL for the 1.5TB and below cartridges, Archival Disc (which is basically an evolution of BDXL) for 3.3TB and up.
I was replying to https://slashdot.org/comments....
The part that said "Yeah, we suck. We just think we are better than everyone else because we never go anywhere else."
Afaik the border is still closed.
Meantime I go to Canada and back a few times a year.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And they don't require a passport?
That's great news to me!
Say hello to the Canadians for me from oklahoma please.
I am not likely to get another chance to sightsee for another several years. No time or $ for vacations anymore.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
And they don't require a passport?
Passport or Gvt issued card just for Canada. Are you somehow conflating The need for identification as "closed border?" Hell, we've always had to provide ID.
That's great news to me!
Say hello to the Canadians for me from oklahoma please.
I am not likely to get another chance to sightsee for another several years. No time or $ for vacations anymore.
Sure, they are a nice bunch. Too bad about the time and money thing. No worry, we'll all be wealthy soon.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Well it's been several years ago I know ID was not required for anyone other than the driver at the time and I don't remember them even asking for that just what we were crossing for.
Let me tell you those border agents have no sense of humor if they ask "is that your daughter?" the correct response is not "my wife says she is".
When before all you had to have to drive across the border was an oklahoma ID (at most we had no further ID with us at the time). For requiring a passport closed seemed an appropriate term maybe I should have used "less open"? I don't really know how to term the difference.
My understanding was after 9/11 a passport was required as a minimum ID for a border crossing and it had never been set back to a state ID being acceptable.
Should have the building loan paid off in a decade or two then we should be able to do things again.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Let me tell you those border agents have no sense of humor if they ask "is that your daughter?" the correct response is not "my wife says she is".
I know exactly why you mean. When my kid was in high school, we took him to Hockey camps in Canada. The rule was no jokes from either kids or adults. Must have been some cross border parentnapping or something. He threatened to put a "help me" note against the window. He has that sense of humor. I doto, but not in this case.
Should have the building loan paid off in a decade or two then we should be able to do things again.
Don't know if you've toured the thousand Islands area, but it's treat for the eyes. Algonquin and Georgian Bay and The capital area are a lot of fun too.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yes, you're right, I missed this development.
But my god, the price! (and ODA is Sony-only. After their adventures in SAIT, I don't want to take that risk. Single source anything is a technological risk)
1.5TB: £100 vs £17 for LTO5, 30% slower write speed
Standalone drive £6000 vs £800 for LTO5 standalone, with the changers costing a LOT more than equivalent tape libraries.
And of course, LTO is up to LTO7 (6TB raw) with LTO8 (12TB raw) due out soon
Experience with optical devices and jukeboxes has NOT been good. Until last year I had a couple of 500-disk Sony changers which never performed particularly well compared with hierarchical systems based on tape. (Hint: disc jukeboxes take about as long to load and seek as a tape does and they only exhibit low seek latency if they're actually working). As a result they were stuck in a broom closet and ignored for 5 years.