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90-Gigabyte Solid-State "Hard Drive?"
CrtxReavr
writes "American Computer Company: "Described as a "Poker
Chip Sized" solid state disk drive, the new semiconductor could
be seen in service by the end of 1999 or early in the year 2000.
The device can store over 90 billion characters of information..."
This sounds like it's too good to be true and the article excludes
a lot of important information that would be necessary for
verification purposes, for what they claim is security reasons.
It prolly is worth scrutinizing though. "
Want some scrutiny? Conor Walsh
sent us a good list of problems:
- They can't spell 'terahertz' properly.
- They did a really bad job with paintbrush. I have personally done better jobs. (I have a picture of Bill Clinton getting off AF-1 with an earring... I laughed my ass off when a worse one appeared in a tabloid two weeks after I made it.)
- If it operates with almost no heat/power dissipation at 12 THz, why not raise it to 20 or so?
- Wait... a hard drive doesn't have a frequency!
- '...semiconducting microswitches...replacing transistors...', except that's what transistors are!
- 'Low Power TCAPS Technology drains only 1 ma/hr during operation.' Thoroughly impossible... the ampere is not something that can be measured over time... it's an instantaneous thing. It could draw a current of one mA for an hour of operation, but it would also draw the same for a minute or a year. The term for electricity over time, in this case, would be the Couloumb. (Amps*seconds)
Hey, my web site says that I invented the damn transistor, and *I* say that their claims are false. You gotta believe me... I mean, I invented the TRANSISTOR! And if that's not enough for you, I invented solder! Heck, I even invented electrons! :)
I'm amazed that people are giving this ANY credibility... I guess I should collect all yer email addresses for the IPO of my anti-gravity-engine company....
I really feel sorry for the poor little green men (tm) on Mars. Imagine being stuck with "embedded Windows NT" on every single 90GB hard disk!
2 dashes and a space, or just 2 dashes?
I haven't been able to find any mention of this periodical anywhere. Anyone ever actually hear about it, let alone see it?
æeee!
To say that the article excludes a lot of technological information is an understatement. The article claims that they don't know where the technology came from! Either their command of the English language is absolutely terrible, or this is a perfect candidate for Joe Firmage's new company to fund.
The web site looks like more of an April Fools' joke...they slapped their logo on a Pentium II cartridge with some paint program, took a stock photo of a silicon wafer and somehow came up with this "unknown" technology that they aren't going to sell to the monopolizing computer companies.
Does anyone REALLY believe this? Remember, just because it's on the web doesn't mean that it's true!
=h=
Well well color me confused.
all about the tcap: seems to be fairly valid, and its on bell labs site. So this might accually be alien technology. ARG. I don't know weither to be amazed or critical. For right now, I'm very critical
NEVERMIND they are not belllabs.. wow I feel stupider and stupider each minute today.
Oh yes, they are very credible, they also claim that aliens helped them invent the transistor.
sure I believe them.
I have a about 25 servers with 4GB+ of ECC memory. Guess what? Every month or two, one of them needs a DIMM replaced due to persistent ECC memory errors. Memory is not absolutely perfect. In especially high quantities (50+ gb), there are going to be flaws on the chips.
So you've got a ~90gb solid state drive on a single chip. What's going to be my bit error rate? And it seems rather expensive to replace a single $900 chip when it goes bad.
Yet another reason why this article is bogus. (That, and it may have low access times... but one a single chip, what's going to be my throughput in mb/sec?)
I would label this as another pipe dream whipped up to attract interest)
from the public... at least until I've seen some real progress in wafer
scale integration in the commercial area. The idea in it self to use
whole wafers of memory, processors or combinations of them is in no way
new (I even have a vague recollection of Sir Clive of ZX fame funding some
project way back). After doing a little bit of digging around on the net
I found an interesting article in EE Times at
http://www.eet.com/news/98/1001news/switch.html
The company mentioned in the article seems still to be alive (and can be
found at http://www.hyperchip.com) and seems to be intent to develop a
peta-bit router. Still no sight of a real product though.
Here are a couple of points with wafer scale integration that the article
spreads some light on. The larger the circuit the less yield you will get
from the process. To get around this you add circuits to detect and work
around these errors - but these corrective circuits are also marred by the
same amount of errors as the rest of the wafer. And adding even more
redundant circuits eats up more and more of the wafer. And in the end the
yields were to low to make it commercially viable.
And Richard Norman from Hyperchip says "The only commercial wafer-scale
product I have heard of was a 2-Mbit, 3-inch SRAM wafer back in the days of
64-kbit SRAM chips"
Neat idea though... but until you show me the silicon I will not show you
my money. But do read the article in EE Times - it's a nice piece.
Jari
Before reading the article (and even halfway down it), I was almost gulled into thinking 'cool'
except that the claims were a bit too good to be true.
As soon as the article stated mumbling about terahertz speeds (now isn't any electromagnetic wave at frequency somewhere in the
far infrared range?) and the origins of the complex designs for this technology being totally
unknown(roswell! roswell!)- I remembered seeing these guys (American Computers) put up similarly preposterous claims previously.
What I can't work out is:
a) does American Computer want to be taken seriously on this?
b) is it some sort of (very silly) con or scam.
c) some sort of method of getting extra site hits from gullible people (hey I visited the site...).
d) Some sort of gag/humor site/parody. It did kind of make me smile. If it's a gag, they've certainly made it very deadpan.
e) do these people really have this product (tinfoil hat time methinks)
All I know about this site is that it's been around for a while and that they've made similar claims before. I just forgot about them.
At least the blurb warned us that the information might be rather unreliable....
This thing would obsolete disk drives *and* conventional memory. Based on the performance claims, it would probably obsolete cache memory also. It's not entirely clear, based on the claims, that it won't be faster than CPU registers!
Naturally, I'm a little skeptical based only on those performance claims. I might remain hopeful, however, except that the way they try to frame the performance claims in terms that sound impressive to the unsophisticated user: "...100,000's of times faster than the fastest mainframe hard drives ever made by IBM." *cough*
They go on to claim that it will be released "next year" in a document that claims to be the 1st revistion dated November, 1997. (the copyright dates, however, do include 1999).
I'll wait for independent benchmarking of the samples, thank you.
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