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Ask Slashdot: Breaking the Computing Bottleneck?

Posted by Cliff on from the when-will-it-happen? dept.

MidKnight asks: : "With CPU speeds venturing into the GHz, typical DRAM access times falling towards 6ns, and network speeds trying out the 100Mb waters, the major computing bottleneck continues to be the hard drive. While other hardware speeds grow in orders of magnitude, hard drives aren't much faster than they were in the 70's. So, the question is, when will mass storage speeds start catching up, and what will the cause the revolution?"

3 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. More info. by Booker · · Score: 3

    Heh, did some more digging, and they *do* claim that the technology came from aliens! :-)

    Here's a guy who has some info on their claims, mostly debunking them. http://www.uni-weimar.de/~kuehnel/TrueorNot.htm

  2. infrastress by trb · · Score: 4

    John Mashey (SGI, was MIPS, Bell Labs) has been lecturing recently on "Infrastress" which discusses the problem of computer architecture not keeping up with CPU speed. Not just a problem of slow disks, which can be raided to get parallel speed increases, but bus and net bandwidths, etc. He says: "It's as if cars suddenly became 10 times cheaper, but the roads didn't change." See articles: here and here.

  3. Holographic Data Storage by molozonide · · Score: 5
    Litium Niobate is one cystalline candidate for holographic data storage. However, it is too expensive to compete with more conventional types of data storage.

    There's ongoing research ( http://nanonet.rice.edu/research/boy d_res.html) to use photopolymers as a cheaper holographic medium. If such research comes to fruition, you're more likely to see CD like disks coated w/ a holographic layer than the typical science fiction "data crystal."

    Other problems w/ holograms:
    - materials are not totally transparent, so "cubes" might be out of the question

    -materials must be chemically resistant to the atmosphere (e.g. oxidation, humidity), which might necessitate that they are coated. Such a coating might have deleterious effects on the substrates optical properties.

    - storing a hologram changes the structure of the crystal, which can cause limits of data density and beam penetration.

    - multiple holograms can be stored at the same location by rotating the crystal, but each hologram attenuates the possible intensity of subsequent holograms in that location.

    - holographic "efficency" is a funciton of the difference between the refractive indices of the substrate components. photopolymers have a very small range of refractive indices as oppossed to inorganic crystals.

    Overall the medium might not be rewritable, but a high density, long lasting storage medium would be ideal for back-ups.

    Anyway, it's been awhile since I "got out of the business" of chemistry, but this is what I remember.