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Penny-size 180 Gigabits CDROMs
Noel writes "Princeton University electrical engineer Stephen Chou who directs the NanoStructures Laboratory, has created CDs that can concentrate data 800 times more efficiently than current discs. " Tiny storage is my friend.
This is only one of many possible high-density storage technologies on the horizon. The article itself contains a link to many others; read them, and see what other interesting things are going on.
Delivered in a really big box, where you REALLY have to search hard for that tiny box containing the CD. Finally, you find the cd, try to put your thumb on the thing in the middle so you can get it out (the special tool made for this purpose you lost during the first week you just got the drive), but the thumb's too big.
After a few minutes you get it out (managing to drop it on the floor first of course). "Now if I could just find that eject button, it's supposed to be here somewhere...". A while later, you give up and eject it using the OS (Windows 2007?).
Then you're greeted with the install screen, after lots of tiring, pointless texts you don't want to read, you're asked to input the 192-digit serial number, found on the back of the CD cover. Luckily, you're a nerd, so you do have a microscope, but it isn't easy to read it. After about half an hour of trying, you get it right and reach the "real" install screen.
Recommended install: 100 GB
Full install: 140 GB
Uh oh, time to free up some diskspace...
And so on.
assuming that the unusable portion at the center of a CD has a radius of 1.25 inches, i get:
((5.25/2)^2*pi - (1.25)^2*pi) * 400 / 8
(21.6475 - 4.9087) * 50
~837 GigaBYTES per CD.
Why not make a normal sized CD that holds obsecene amounts of data? Now *that* I would like.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
that's what i like about cd's ... they are small enough to be portable but big enough that i don't lose them so much ... don't make them the size of a penny! ... i'll never find them ... a penny? ... cripes ... i lose that in the sofa ... those fall out of the wholes in my pockets ... that sounds awfull
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if knowledge is power, the internet is god - me again
This sounds really neat, but... It should be ready in 5-10 years, and it can store 800 times the data. Hmm. Gee, this sounds like what we can expect from normal exponential growth, eh?
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Think about it... 180 gigabits = 22.5 giga bytes.. an mp3 player that could hold enough music to play continuously for like a year of non stop music.
Lets say that a grain of sand is about
0.0001 mm in diameter, and for the purposes of this examination it is round and close enough top be flat. Therefore it will cover
pi* D^2/4 = 0.00000000785 mm^2 of the disc (Asuming the AFM doesn't push it out of the way.)
400gbits/645 mm^2 (1 inch = 25.4 mm, in^2 = 25.4^2 mm^2) ~= 62015503 bits per mm^2
therefore 1 partical of dust would destroy about
..
Oh hell with it. Alot. These things would need clean room conditions (probably better) to be any good. Which tends to suggest putting them in vacuum sealed containers. But that means the AFM would have to be packaged in there too. Somehow I don't see these being in stores anytime in the next like 10 years anyways.
More Caffeine. NOW
...with a cd this small, i could get a boxed-set worth of the backstreet boys and literally shove it up their asses, seeing as how that's where their music came from.
*cough* i apologize for that outburst, but i am just sick of their annoying voices on the radio.
seriously though, i for one would like a storage space that small. a normal sized cd would never fit into a pilot sized computer. with the penny-sized media we can finally make the desktops and the palmtops closer in accessiblity. plus, didn't that russian E2K processor supposedly would provide a desktop-power chip for a pocket-sized computer? (i seem to remember reading that in russian on a page at www.el2000.ru). normal cd's are a little too big. minidiscs are almost the perfect size to carry around, but still they are too big for palmtops. perhaps they could half that size without making the discs too easy to lose.
also, if we make normal sized CD's with fast read (/write?) access, then we will give all the more reason for microsloth to bloat, bloat, bloat, and bloat some more.
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
This would be cool. It'll make good use of all those piggy banks. Just replace those pennies with little mini-disks and instead of 5 dollars in pennies I have 87 Terabits of storage :)
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
This was posted 7/27/98 ...1998..I imagine, a year has passed, and that we could maybe even store more now. =] I agree with the previous post of losing the CDs in the couch though. Hah. Though, I would still fear the cost of such a drive to read (Or write? Eek) to such medium. Anyone figure about how much we could store if the platter was the size of a standard CD? Or how much could be stored in a nice washer-sized disk array? *grins* ..
Finally, when people call and ask how to download the internet, we can say "Go buy this nifty nano-CDR"
Why waste CPU cycles on compression? With this much space you could store audio and video in uncompressed form. Just dump everything through an ADC and write it to the disk. This would eliminate all of the compression artifacts that you get with MP3 and MPEG.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
That's why slot-loading CD/DVD drives are your friend. Of course, then someone will think it's a toaster slot...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Second of all, imagine the horrible skip protection on these!!! The "needle" is floating a few micrometers off the surface of the disc - If you kicked the table it was sitting on then KA-CHUNGG, you'd have a big fat dent in your SSCD (SuperSubCompactDisc) and a bent player head (I bent my Wookie). At least with current CD technology the laser has a few mm's of clearance from the disc surface.
Cool story, and it's a sure thing that this electron-beam imprinting will be used in future storage. Keep on working, boys!
Wah!
Nah, the Kenwood? TrueX 52x is a little faster. Moreover, it's better because instead of spinning much faster it reads multiple tracks(?) in parallel, so the drive isn't as noisy as many other fast drives. Combine the multi-read tech with faster rates and 100-200x shouldn't be out of reach.
Note that with a smaller disk, higher RPMs should be practical, with current CDs rotational imbalances are a problem with going faster. I just hope that if they do an incompatible size, they finally put them in cases a la 3 1/2" floppies so we can write on them, put stickers on them, avoid scratching them, etc.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
>If toast was that small to start with.....
:-)
Matzoh, maybe?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Not writeable, period, as far as I can tell from the article - at least in home drives. You would stamp them in the production plant, and that would be it. The drive reads out the waviness of the plastic coating the metal substrate - there's no easy way to etch that yourself (you can't even use lasers to carve it, as the feature size is much too small).
Adjust accordingly.
Tech Support: Thank you for calling, how may I help you?
Customer: Yeah, this computer you sold me is crap.
TS: What seems to be the problem?
C: The cupholder is too @#$% small. What do you think I am, a #$%^ midget. How am I supposed to fit a Grande Tiazzi on one of these? Are you stupid or something?
That's 180 gigabits, mind you. Nobody, even on slashdot, seems to be able to understand the distinction between gigabits and gigabytes. Divide gigabits by 8 to get gigabytes. This penny-size "CD-ROM" can hold 22.5 GB.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Read the headline, darnit. This is the third comment I've seen, on a supposedly technically literate site like slashdot of all places, which mistakenly assumes that "180 gigabits" means "180 GB." Since all modern desktop computers use 8-bit bytes, this penny-sized device would hold 22.5 gigs, not 180.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
How do you have a 31-hour playlist with only 1.03 gigabytes of MP3s? Even at 128kbps, 1.03 gigabytes only fits around 17.5 hours of music. If you want good quality music, push the bitrate up to 160 or 192 kbps, and you fit even less.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Did anyone else notice that the sizes quoted are Gigabits, not GigaBytes - simple arithmetic will give you the real figure...Don't get me wrong, I don't wish to belittle the great work these guys are doing, just put it in perspective.
So when are they finally going to perfect the technology that will make pennies the size of CDROMs?
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Put Hemos through English 101!
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Uhhh, yes, and most of them use 1000-millivolt volts, too. It's a definition: 8 bits is one byte.
No, it's not. It has come to be generally accepted, since nearly all (all?) computers now use 8-bit bytes, but "8 bits" is not the definition of "byte." Some of the old PDP computers used 10-bit bytes.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10