A 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive?

Angry_Admin writes "Rather than spend millions of dollars for an array of hard drives when you can have all that storage on just one drive? A story at P2P.net US inventor Michael Thomas, owner of Colossal Storage, says he's the first person to solve non-contact optical spintronics which will in turn ultimately result in the creation of 3.5-inch discs with a million times the capacity of any hard drive - 1.2 petabytes of storage, to be exact. According to the article, In the past, data storage has only been able to orient the direction a field of electrons as they move around a molecule, Thomas said. "But now there's a way to rotate or spin the individual electrons that make up, or surround, the molecule," he says. He expects a finished product to be on the market in about four to five years, adding the cost would probably be in the range of $750 each."

Just A Second

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I've already got one of these. It's right between my cold fusion device and my copy of Duke Nukem Forever.

That's a lot..

[swilde23]

Of pron... or maybe mp3's. Hell, I can afford to store both now.

Blast from the past

[suso]

Sounds kinda like American Computer Company [slashdot.org]

Star Trek?

[77Punker]

"But now there's a way to rotate or spin the individual electrons that make up, or surround, the molecule"

Yeah, they do the stuff with the electrons using Heisenberg compensators.

Yikes!

[toupsie]

Can you imagine what happens when this thing crashes? That is going to be one long restore...

To answer the question

[harmonica]

A 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive?

No, 640 TB should be enough for everyone.

Re:A million times?

[grub]

Um... 1.2 PB is definitely *not* "a million times the capacity of any hard drive", unless you're still stuck with 1.2 GB hard drives.

The author was probably using Imperial Petabytes, not Metric Petabytes.

Obligatory Jokes:

[thomble]

"Finally, I don't need to trim down my porn collection!"
"Finally, I can cache the internet!"
"The hard drive racket will never let this see the light of day!"
"RAI(E)D: Redundant Array of Insanely Expensive Disks."
"Now, if he was talking about RAM, I'd be impressed."

"B-B-B-But Moore said!...."

Price

[professorfalcon]

the cost would probably be in the range of $750 each

Is that before or after rebate?

Who need so much data storage?

[LinuxRulz]

When they ship, I'll order 2 of them. They'll be perfect to make a backup of that /dev/random file.

Re:Star Trek?

[cgenman]

Looks legitamate [colossalstorage.net] to me.

It is a simple question of getting your entangled particle encryption to spin your atomic holographic optical nanostorage drive in an accredited OLED Display_n_Store handheld device reader, thus creating standing quantum waves in the ferroelectric perovskite molecules. With sufficient surface conduction, why, you could induce resonant absorption excitation via plasmon photonic bandgap crystals. Just think of high-k dipole dielectric material that can then be made reversible with non-dissipative power, all thanks to the Einstein / Plank theorem of Energy Quantum!

This unique nanotechnology will set the stage for the 5 exabytes of new data generated every year world wide and growing through molecular dissociation.

This assumes, of course, that you have a capacitor of sufficient size to handle 1.21 jigawatts of flux.

Cheap storage for the rest of us.

[AHuxley]

Finally cheap storage for all of us.
We can now put all our data into 1 folder and run a p2p app.

In capitalist west you backup 1.2 Petabyte of data.
In Soviet Union KGB have same 1.2 Petabyte of your data.

If 2. did occur

[nightsweat]

Would you then have a peta- cemetary for your data?

Re:1.2 Petabyte equals

[SilentOneNCW]

It's good to know that Data has enough space to store all of the files shared on Kazaa. Now, if only he had some speakers...

Re:Predictions of "4-5 years away" never are

[ThomK]

how many times are we promised phenomenal increases in storage, processing power, batteries, etc that are only "4-5 years away"?

117. [google.com]

Re:1.2 Petabyte equals

[geobeck]

Didn't he say in the second episode of the first season (The Naked Now), something like...

I am fully functional, and trained in multiple techniques...

...and give Tasha Yar a robotic ride?

Moving storage is the fastest way to move data

[j-stroy]

As data densities have increased, physically moving the storage devices has become faster than broad band transmission of data between storage devices.
ie shipping hard drives rather than using fiber. (or for that matter using carrier pigeons and FlashRam. [slashdot.org])
How long will it be before we have a coast to coast pneumatic tube system to ship data?

Or even better, an evacuated ballistic subway for delivering harddrives..

Come to think of it, how about a continuous loop of "data tape" which encircles the globe at ground level, and orbits within an evacuated pipeline.

heh heh. Its not really that far fetched.

Just in time for MS Word 2010 to ship!

[CFD339]

At least we'll have enough space to store it!

Just enough...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just enough space for a Vista install!

Yeah but after

[hobotron]

1.2 PB is all well and good until you format it and the fucker only has 300 Gigs.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drive#.22Market ing.22_capacity_versus_true_capacity/ [wikipedia.org])

colosalstorage.com Credibility?

[BigBlockMopar]

Oh my... I just went to their webpage. I haven't clicked anything, but their lack of product and development focus and the sheer incredulity of some of their products is reminiscent of the stuff advertised in the back of Mad Magazine. All they need is X-ray glasses, sea monkeys and a secret decoder ring. And a hoverconversion kit for 1981-1983 Delorean DMC-12 sports cars.

Silly, at best

[Pres. Ronald Reagan]

Think of the uses for which the average person uses his hard drive:

Email; web; instant messaging. Twenty jigabytes at MOST.

Now think of what the person who will fill this sized hard drive to capacity will use it for:

Pirated music; pirated software; perverse poronographic imagery (most certainly pirated), and other anti-social material.

There is absolutely no rational reason that any law abiding citizen could EVER need a hard drive of this size.

In fact, perhaps there should be a law on hard drives over 100 GB; I know I certainly don't have over 100 GB of emails or IM logs or web cache.

Just a thought.

Re:That's a lot..

[Kenshin]

MP3s?

At that point, one has to ask why bother with compression?

Re:Eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

2. So my PETABYTES of data don't all go down the tube at once.

At first I was thinking about all the pron I could store on it and the agony of it all being lost at once. Then I realized it might be a bad idea to have porn on a petabyte storage device. They would have to be stored in files and they might be called petafiles. This would suck! All my pron is over 18 (as thier sites say) but i'm not sure if some bible thumping do gooder would belive me if I associated with known petafiles.

Re:Backups, anybody?

[jpatters]

I really can't imagine filling a drive that's a thousand times the size of what I want until we have full-resolution movies for our 108" plasma screens that have the same pixel pitch as computer LCDs (so.. what... about 10800p?), encoded at something more or less equivalent to 45.1ch WAV audio and video as bitmaps reading at 60fps.

1.2 Petabytes is enough for only 1.89 hours of 25,380 x 10,800 (2.35:1) video, at 16 bits per color channel, 120 frames per second (as long as we are being ridiculous, lets have an even multiple of 24 please), and with 400 separate languages each with 50 channels of CD quality audio. Uncompressed of course. That would be about 199 GB per second. Note that the audio here is less than 1 percent of the total.

Re:Backups, anybody?

[BlackSabbath]

Don't worry - I've already backed up my petabyte porn collection - on a device called the Internet.

Re:That's nothing

[aventius]

Chuck Norris has already invented all of these but is too humble to take any credit.

Re:Eh?

[TenLow]

It'd be more fun to have RAID-0 and set some record for most data lost in a single powersurge.

Re:That's a lot..

[maxwell demon]

Bah, 100GB. With all his other claims, I'm sure this guy already has the 100Tb network ready at that time. However, a few years from that, you'll not need it any more because you can get his great prediction program, which just will accurately predict whatever traffic you would get on your network, and therefore you can avoid to actually transfer the data.

Larger storage devices are not the answer...

[Ingolfke]

I've been working on perfecting my algorithm for 1-bit compression and should have it ready to go in the next 3 to 5 years. Once released you'll be able to encrypt and compress all of your data down to a single bit. The algorithm will run effectively on processors found in most cell phones; it's not processor intensive. This will eliminate the need for big storage devices and high bandwidth connections.

Re:If 2. did occur

[StikyPad]

I thought that's where animal rights advocates go to die...

Re:That's nothing

[StikyPad]

I tried cutting and pasting your comment into your sig, but it's not working.

Re:Eh?

[leonmergen]

If I owned some giant company needing hundreds of terabytes of storage, I'd use these as economical backup storage. If you're storing terabytes, you can afford to throw away a few 750 dollar drives.

I don't think the warez kiddo's are that wealthy... :-)

Re:If 2. did occur

[Starcub]

Not if the data could still be recovered by employing a peta-detective.

Re:Larger storage devices are not the answer...

[rlp]

Ingolfke wrote: I've been working on perfecting my algorithm for 1-bit compression ...

Sorry, beat you to it. Check this out: '0'. Pretty impressive, isnt' it?

Phantom?

[cspring007]

I hear the makers of the phantom gaming system are going to use this in their product.

Re:If 2. did occur

[javamann]

Just think, what would you call a really big jpeg.... a peta file.