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Scientists Perfect Technique To Create Most Dense, Solid-State Memory in History that Could Soon Exceed the Capabilities of Current Hard Drives By 1,000 Times (newatlas.com)
New submitter weedjams shares a report: Scientists at the University of Alberta have demonstrated a new data storage technique that stores zeroes and ones by the presence (or absence) of individual hydrogen atoms. The resulting storage density is an unparalleled 1.2 petabits per square inch -- 1,000 times greater than current hard disk and solid state drives, and 100 times greater than Blu-rays. The researchers, led by PhD student Roshan Achal and physics professor Robert Wolkow, built on a technique previously developed by Walkow that used the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to remove or replace individual hydrogen atoms resting on a silicon substrate.
The inconceivably small dimensions (a hydrogen atom is only half a nanometer in diameter) allow for an astounding data storage density of 1.1 petabits (138 terabytes) per square inch. By comparison, a Blu-ray disk can "only" store about 12 terabits of data in the same area (one hundredth the data density), while both traditional magnetic hard drives and solid-state drives store somewhere in the region of 1.5 terabits per square inch (a thousandth of the density). This development, says Achal, could allow you to store the entire iTunes library of 45 million songs on the surface of a US quarter-dollar coin.
Achal and his team demoed the technology by creating a 192-bit cell, which they used to store a simple rendition of the Super Mario Bros video game theme song. To show the rewrite capabilities, the scientists also created an 8-bit memory cell which they used to store the letters of the alphabet one by one, represented via their respective ASCII code. Further reading: ScienceDaily, and Nature.
The inconceivably small dimensions (a hydrogen atom is only half a nanometer in diameter) allow for an astounding data storage density of 1.1 petabits (138 terabytes) per square inch. By comparison, a Blu-ray disk can "only" store about 12 terabits of data in the same area (one hundredth the data density), while both traditional magnetic hard drives and solid-state drives store somewhere in the region of 1.5 terabits per square inch (a thousandth of the density). This development, says Achal, could allow you to store the entire iTunes library of 45 million songs on the surface of a US quarter-dollar coin.
Achal and his team demoed the technology by creating a 192-bit cell, which they used to store a simple rendition of the Super Mario Bros video game theme song. To show the rewrite capabilities, the scientists also created an 8-bit memory cell which they used to store the letters of the alphabet one by one, represented via their respective ASCII code. Further reading: ScienceDaily, and Nature.
Record video of everything you say and do in your entire life.
Imagine, more porn than one can possibly watch in a lifetime in the palm of my hand
They've stored 192 bits in a lab, and they're claiming that all of iTunes could fit on a quarter "soon?" Are they also selling bridges?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
And with the average broadband in the US being about 50Mb/s DL and 5 UP, I guess it should take a while to fill with content.
Not to mention, Cock (or is it Cox?) will surely throttle your connection long before you ever get the chance.
Cool tech if they can make it an actual product but I am getting hung up on their storage density of Blu-ray disks. Since when can a Blu-ray disk store 12 terabits of data per square inch? As far as I am aware the largest disks store 128GB of data on a what my quick back of the envelop calculations show to be around 12 square inches.
Nintendo will want $100M for that Super Mario Bros usage.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As neat as this news is, it's going to just remain a curiosity. I mean, there have been hundreds of similar news over the years and how many of those have actually materialized into a useful product? A tiny, miniscule fraction, that's how many.
I'll get excited once there's something that seems like it might actually make it into the market as a product I might one day be able to afford, but this ain't that.
At least it's not yet another promising battery technology.
I really feel the need to point out that a hydrogen atom does not, in fact, have a diameter equal to half a nanometer. It's 0.05 nm.
Umm... why? Serious question.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I don't get it...
I've heard about these techniques before. Atomic Force Microscopes, DNA storage, they all have the same problems. Incredible storage densities but the ability to read and write quickly is missing.
In order to commercialize this technology you have to overcome the bottleneck of terrible I/O speeds. Oh, and you need to incorporate an atomic microscope into your storage device. That is not great for commercialization prospects.
Short of that, these storage systems are only good for offline data storage, and situations where exceptionally high density must be achieved at any cost.
Unless they overcome the access speed issues listed in the article, it is going to be much slower than existing storage methods. But this could be used as a long term storage layer, below a faster SSD.
Scientists at the University of Alberta have demonstrated a new data storage technique that stores zeroes and ones by the presence (or absence) of individual hydrogen atoms
In other words a exotic design that barely works in the lab, with no chance of working in the real world. But give us 20 years and we might have something.
Didn't we hear the same thing about some holographic crystal storage 20 years ago?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Cmon. Canada. I know you are Canadian, but cmon. Canada? University of Alberta?
Besides reliable operation at room temperature, the biggest issue with atomic-scale memories always has been read and (especially) write speed, since they use an atomic force microscope. It will be interesting to see how the technology develops to overcome these limitations.
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/ga...
Users will still find a way to burn up the drive space in no time at all. Speaking as a storage admin.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Where are these multi terabyte blu rays tfs refers to? this summanry is nonsense. Also the first and second paragraphs says basically the same. how do you read and write this "memory"
That doesn't answer the question... again, why should this be so surprising when Canada is not a backwater country without any ubiquitous access to modern technology?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Back in the day when Slashdot was a new thing and I recently purchased a 5 GB drive, my friend and I would bring over a collection of media and we would see how quickly we could fill the new drive. Less than a few hours.
We repeated the experiment when I upgraded to a 13 GB drive and again when I moved up to a 20 GB drive and later to a 250 GB drive.
I haven't done such an experiment in a long long time, but to do such again would be tempting.
I doubt my cable provider would like me if I did this over the wire.
Place something witty here
a technique previously developed by Walkow that used the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to remove or replace individual hydrogen atoms resting on a silicon substrate.
Wow, a chip the size of my thumbnail that can hold 2.8 LOCs!
Too bad the reader will be the size of an 80's Dell desktop.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thanks. I had missed that one.
In other news, scientists have created a better battery! Or was it a mouse trap? I'll get my hopes up when I can buy it. Getting tired of all this sensationalist crap that never see's the light of day.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
The described procedure is not easily scaled. It has been known for a long time that you could push individual atoms around with a needle, at least 10 years ago IBM produced an IBM logo made of individual atoms. This sets a theoretical record, for densest relatively static medium. I guess subatomic and field versions might go smaller.
But this is not at all about practical storage. To have that, you don't only need a small medium, you need a way to address large amounts of it efficiently, and access the addressed bits to read or write them.
Bruce Perens.
Scientists at the University of Alberta have demonstrated a new data storage technique that stores zeroes and ones by the presence (or absence) of individual hydrogen atoms.
That's kind of a tight tolerance there ... not much room for error, ya know ...
I am happily surprised to learn that current commodity technology is within 1000x of manipulating individual atoms. That's amazing for anybody who worked with shoebox-sized 5MB drives.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Demonstrating a technology is a long ways from perfecting a technology...
I would agree with "unexpected," because many do not know that the University of Alberta hosts the Canadian National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT). Also many are not aware that Robert Wolkow entered the Guinness Book of Records with the "Sharpest Object Ever Made": https://www.ualberta.ca/newtra... But it is the practical translation of this new technology into nanomanufacturing that will make this computer memory revolution possible: https://www.ualberta.ca/scienc... Now, the University of Alberta will not only be know for being the birthplace of Deepmind's AlphaGo, but also for starting the nanomanufacturing revolution.
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my disk?
If it moves hydrogen atoms around it could conceivably be used as a battery of sorts.
I thought the article was light on information until I watched the embedded video. Wow.
Yep, unfortunately these stories almost always describe vaporware. I fondly remember all these magical reports about Tesa ROM and Tesa Worm and wonder every few years about what happened to this technology. Wo don't have the paperless office or flying cars yet either, and the robot also doesn't work for me so I have more spare time. :-/
Color me skeptical, but I'm still waiting for Page Oriented Holographic Memory. I'm looking at you January 1991 issue of Byte Magazine! You got my hopes up and still no trillions of bits on a microscope slide.
1989... 29 years ago.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
From the article, "Unfortunately, writing speeds still leave something to be desired. According to the accompanying paper, writing each 8-bit ASCII code took between 10 and 120 seconds, which isn't exactly practical for today's consumer products. However, the fact that this technology is built on silicon and uses materials that can easily interface with existing semiconductor technology bodes well for the future automation of the process." Isn't exactly practical is quite an understatement. A bit premature for a press release on this one, unless seconds should read milli- or nano-
for $190. It was a good price. I just bought a 500 gig SSD for $150, and I could have had a fast 1 terabyte platter drive for $60.
:).
Maybe this won't be the next storage solution, but maybe it will. You never know. But we've increased storage by 70-140x while adjusting for inflation dropped the price massively. I can't complain really. I say let the boffins work
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So, is it 1.1 or 1.2 petabits per square inch?
Not sure which one is more mind-boggling... that there's 45 million songs on iTunes, or that they can store them all on something the size of a quarter.
Call me naive, but how do you store the Super Mario Bros theme song in 192 bits? I guess you could make a 1-voice version and store the note and the duration in a few bits per note, giving you room for a few notes, but how "simple" is this rendition?
#DeleteFacebook
"100 times greater than Blu-Ray" is wildly incorrect. Blu-ray is about 12.5Gb per square inch; 1.2Pb would therefore be an areal density nearly 100,000 times greater than Blu-Ray.
Last time I heard it's nearly impossible to contain hydrogen as it leaks almost through everything. Good luck reading your data years after it was stored.
Mind boggling, really? For me, 300 MPH is mind boggling... my mind would absolutely boggle if I could get up to that on the freeway. Mind boggling is really not a term that belongs in a Slashdot summary. It doesn't tell us much. Our minds are sufficiently boggled by matter travelling at relativistic speeds, thank you, could you please say it that way? Oh I forgot, the editor just cut and pasted this from the original article, which was aimed at knuckledraggers.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Soon neans dont cut ouer funding plz we are realy close, yea right. Donkt get me wrong I supportbr&d but thair timfrwmes donâ(TM)t usualy agree whit my understanding of soon (this might be a personsl failing on my part, but i wish often used terms like thst could be more cleary deffined and universaly agreed upon , rhey could vary for different things but at least we would have a common refference)
I feel like if you actually had this tech in a commercialized form, the smart move would be to short the fuck out of the other storage companies, release the 100PB drives, kill the market, and enjoy your time billionaire island.
But maybe this is why I'm not a billionaire.
That 1.1PB != 138TB?
Announcing in Slashdot a technological breakthrough seems to be the death knell of said breakthrough. My expectation: it will amount to nothing. In a few months, everybody will have forgotten about it.
"Now, the University of Alberta will not only be know for being the birthplace of Deepmind's AlphaGo"
Exactly. That is why this is unlikely.
Cmon. Canada?
https://xkcd.com/678/
Hey yeah, tiny. You only need one of these: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/hist...
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Does Insider trading cover shorting other companies in the industry when yours is about to each their lunch?
Hydrogen Bohr radius is half an Angstrom.
0.05 nanometers
I have given you ample opportunity to justify your position with some particular rationalization, giving you the benefit of the doubt that you had some sort of reason to think it was somehow unlikely that someone in Canada could have done this. Given your continued ignoring of the direct question, and that you merely choose to repeat your expression of incredulity, It seems you have crossed the threshold between being forgivably naive about reality and just plain irrationally bigoted.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'