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Penny-Sized CDs
|deity| pointed us at Discover Magazine, which is running an article about nanoimprint lithography. Cutting to the chase, this gives you 400 gigabytes per square inch, or 180 gigabytes on a CD the size of a penny. The advantage of this manufacturing process over others, such as the optical memory featured recently, is that the moulds can be reused, allowing easy mass production.
What about a beowulf cluster of these? bah..Im I in the wrong forum?
"Dodge this!"
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I thought that was a mini disc. Like the ones sony uses.
No kidding. Like I don't have enough trouble losing my CDs as it is.
The arm is a lot shorter, the disk is a lot stiffer, etc, etc.
This is one situation where the square-cube law works in our favor.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Yep!
Of corse, I will have to buy the White Album again! Damm the RIAA!
They also had the things that *were* penny sized in Escape from LA. You know, the one that had the "666" shut down all electricity code on it...
BTW, I did like EFLA, which a lot of people seemed to hate. Maybe it's because I haven't seen EFNY yet.
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled Slashdotting!
/ramble
The one and (thankfully) only,
LafinJack
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
A 3.5 inch floppy still holds the same 1.44 Mb that it held in 1980, and the CD Rom is still the same capacity it was in 1990 (although the players have gotten faster).
Remember those CD singles that required a special slot on your CD-ROM tray? What ever happened to them? Normal size CD's just so cheap to make anyways that CD-Singles not worth it? Does anyone make CD-R that size? If they had, say, 250 MB of space, and cost only $.25, I think they would possibly be worth it.
"Though it may take a thousand years, we shall be FREE."
Does this mean that I'll be able to buy eleven penny-sized CDs for only a penny?
..
Hmmm
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
And real enough that they're getting some of their funding from IBM, fwiw.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
My name is _EKG_ my email is ekg98@netzero.net if you wanna email me i think these should be something like a super minidisk that has a cleaning mechanism in the disk or in the drive
i used an AFM a couple times and i remember it taking foreeeeeeverrrrrr to aquire the image due to the fact that it had to be extremely precise etc. wont this limit the read rate of a disk like this? also the aticle said that the disk was read by vibrating the tip of the afm and measureing the change in vibration frequency while it was over a pit(or not). this would further limit the read rate b/c you would have to wait at least one vibration cycle before you could measure the frequency and move on to the mext bit. no? correct me if im wrong, im not a physicist.
Neat stuff!!! Finally we will have the storage capacities that the movies and such have promised for years now...
I remember a hard drive manufacturer explaining at one time how there was literally no limit to the amount of data stored on magnetic platters, until you reached the point where you moved individual electrons around on the disc. Looks like maybe we won't need to push that technology quite that far though... look what's here!
now we are serious about a portable mp3 player...
Sounds to be a potentially impressive technology. I have to wonder how reliable the players will be. It sounds as though it will have to be magnitudes more precise than a CD player as far as positioning, and seems that it will be easier to jar and possibly damage. How does the scale of this compare to CD and hard disk technology as far as the head movement/distance from media/etc?
One other thing comes to mind: this is yet another of a series of "better than CD" storage devices I've read about, and I suspect it will not show up in my home any quicker than the Ruby/crystal storage devices that I remember there being so much excitment about a couple years ago. What's the ratio of exciting new storage device ideas to new storage devices?
Intolerant people should be shot.
Yeah, this technique sounds neat... Mass storage, unlimited possibilities!
But what about dust and scratches from which we all suffer with the current CDs?
Sounds like this technique is only suitable for harddisks...
- Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity -
--
"I am not a nut-bag." -- Millroy the Magician
I wonder how many DVD's you would fit on these micro-mini-ultra-compact discs? The days of having every episode of every TV program ever made on a piece of silicon are close...
That is if they agree to some format with "copy protection"...
"Would you like a cold drink with that Sir? Yes, yes, for the sake, of the future, of all mankind, I will have, a sm
The byline for the story said "Posted 7/27/98" so this is apparently fairly old news. It was the subject of a Slashdot article in July http://slashdot.org/articles/99/07/30/1612205.shtm l. At any rate the commercial realization of this work will be some time off since it requires dramatic retooling and the development of a viable atomic force microscope on a chip. The article says 5-10 years, which I interpret as technospeak for not in the forseeable future.
What is more interesting to me is not how well this process will enable the encoding of a ROM since static data has limited applications which will be increasingly displaced by wide band network connections, but whether the atomic force microscope on a chip being developed by IBM will enable the manipulation of a miniature hard disk or particularily dense large hard disk.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Or more than 100 uncompressed 16-bit-per-color 16K x 16K pictures. Now, make that recordable and fast so I can put it in a digital camera...
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
This is rather old. As the article says at the bottom:
Posted 7/27/98
In fact there was a nearly identical story on slashdot story here about the same researcher... just a differnt publication.
dox
That's 128 days (approx.) of non stop listening to MP3's...
-sometimes the majority only means that all the fools are on the same side
Good thing too, just in time for Windows 2001. :>
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
With proper error correction codes, any amount of expected dust and scratches can be accounted for. In fact, with the CD audio standard, one should be able to make a perfect reconstruction of the data on the CD even if it has a 1 mm diameter hole in it. The fact that your player skips is more a problem of the playback hardware not taking full advantage of the redundant information than of the CD itself.
That being said, I would imagine that these "CD's" would be hermetically sealed and sold with the reading hardware. It would be more like a read only hard drive than a CD. Dust wouldn't cause obstruction, but catastrophic abrasion in an unsealed system because the contacts are so close. A surface coating can't be used since the atomic force microscope needs almost direct contact with the surface, like a head on a hard drive, not like the laser and optics on a CD or DVD.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
--
Mattel still retaliates against geek!
Really Compact Disc
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I can't believe I actually measured this.. but I had a ruler and a penny.. :)
The penny is approximately 3/4 of an inch in diameter.. so r=.375, a=pi*r^2, a=3.14*(0.375)^2
a=0.44
x/400 = 0.44
x = 400*0.44
x = 176
approximately 176/400s of an inch.
hehe.. ^_^
-Paul
"I'm nobody suspicious... That makes me sound even more suspicious, doesn't it?" - Spike (Cowboy Bebop)
until you get that teeny little scratch on the plastic...
I know it's still alot, but it's GigaBITS, as opposed to Gigabytes as posted in the headline :P
Saving the world from insignificant typos,
--hakie~!
A
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Top 10 ways to lose a penny size CD
:-\"
:-)
top 10 going by what I can think of right now anyway:
_"Ahh!! my contact is bent!!!"
_"oh no! I just bought a can of (insert softdrink name here) with my copy of Linux!"
_(manual)"Warning: always hold the CD by the edges" *crack* "damn! too thin.. I broke it in half"
_(someone in desperate need of ca$h)"It really is an 1856 penny!!"
_"free pennies for halloween!! hey... where'd my porno go?" "mommy! what're these people doing?"
_(from pen) "Nobody move! I dropped my backup on the floor!"
_(from cje) (Columbia House) "Does this mean that I'll be able to buy eleven penny-sized CDs for only a penny?"
_"Why're you tearing apart the couch?" "I lost my business presentation
_Toss it in a jar thah collects change for blind people
_send it through the washer and dryer... clean, and maybe a little melted..
*phew* enjoy
"By measuring these frequency changes, Chou can read the data. His
technique can store 400 gigabits per square inch, or about 180 gigabits
of information on a penny-size CD."
Doh! Still, would have been nice... =)
The original article said 400 Gigabits/sq in, and 180 Gigabits on a penny-sized disk, not Bytes as reported in the /. article. Still pretty remarkable, especially for what could eventually be a cheap mass-production technology.
Note, however, that the state of the art in hrd disks is now up to c 50 Gigabits/sq in (what a nasty unit that is) so the advance is not that huge.
I have heard of rewritable technologies along these lines. A short burst of electrical current from the AFM tip is used to melt a but, which then cools flat. The same AFM tips are used to scratch new pits.
An interesting side question -- what is the smallest reasonable size for a removable data medium assuming that you have plenty of capacity for your purposes: credit-card sized? large coin sized (UK 50p or £1, US quarter)? Small coin sized (US dime, UK 5p or even Netherlands dime)?
Steve
Maybe I'm in a pesimistic mood today.
Regards,
January
... Size of a dime eh? Why can't they make these babies the size of a 12" vinyl album and give us some REAL storage power :-)
A little planning goes a long way...
Johnson, your carelessness caused us to lose a year's worth of critical data!
But sir, I just got a little scratch on our backup disk! We can recover it with a CD scratch remover!
-Nit Picker
hmmm.... am I the only one who doubts the size of a penny is 180/400s of a square inch ? What does this strange rounding mean in terms of quality of the announcement ? hmmm..... biiig pennies ;-)
If I remember correctly (an I believe I do), I read a story almost exactly the same as this one. I suppose it could be a different story, but the numbers are exactly the same (400 per square inch, 180 per penny-sized disk), so I doubt they are different stories. The only difference in the write-ups, is that this one says gigaBYTEs instead of BITS, which makes a lot of difference. The same thing happened with the other story, and it was fixed promptly after people pointed this out. If I'm not mistaken, and it is bits, then that gives you 50 gb per square inch, and 22.5 per penny-sized disk (assuming an 8 bit byte, which I think is fair). Still nothing to sneeze at, but not quite as spectacular as 400 and 180 respectively. If I am wrong and it is gigabytes, then wow.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
I guess we can throw away all the other unlimited storage devices from past years now. My 1997 40TB credit card lookalike from Opticom is a little dated (not to mention slow).
</irony>
Until this is in the stores, I'll consider this as yet another fraud.
-segfault
It was the size of a soda can. Basically, the whole thing is a little needle on a little spring with a little sensor. That's it. Now, you might have to hook it up to a big computer to crunch through incoming data, but that actual microscope is very small.
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well, its great and everything, but think of the cost! i mean new CDs nowadays already cost like 18 bucks in most places, but this is gonna be insane when/if these things ever hit the market. and, think about the confusion it would make. wouldnt you think that the wrist-watch mini-Cd player thing would cost mass-money? what if you accidently put a REAL penny in there? it's screw that thing to hell and back. heh heh heh...this new crap is gonna be one hell of a trip
I read this in a magazine somewhere... But this thing was way cooler than putting mass storage on a way overpriced medium...
The article showed a backup device burning data 10 layers deep in a tesa-taperoll storing about 100 GB.
Now, that's nifty! Storing 100 GB on a piece of plastic that costs about $0.25!
- Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity -
OK so you want to read a disk with an AFM, I have a question how this thing is going to resist vibrations ??
Now, the AFM and the apparatus which hold the thing you want to probe are mounted on a special kind of basement, used to dampen vibrations if I am not mistaking...
The question is how do you do this kind of thing in your computer ?? To have a good access time you have to rotate the disk quite fast, how do you prevent pin crash ? The pin has to be very close to the disk, much closer than a normal HDD head !
Anyone knows how it would be possible ?
Wasn't this in Men in Black, except about the size of a quarter, with Kay remarking "This is going to replace the CD"?
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?