A 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive? 431
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."
A million times? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:no thanx! (Score:5, Informative)
There's a whole other side to flash technology where large scale, ultra high-speed drives are being made of some very cool flash technology.
Enhancing that so that storage capacities approximate today's largest hard drives, with the speeds that these bad ass flash components can provide, would be great.
All your eggs... (Score:3, Informative)
No. Thank you.
Basic Quantum Mechanics (Score:5, Informative)
This guy is trying to tell people he can control electron spin? That would be quite a trick.
Re:They'd best be careful (Score:3, Informative)
A world without data compression? (Score:2, Informative)
Can you imagine world where it takes 12 hours to download all the images of the latest cyber girl of the month?
Pure BS (Score:5, Informative)
If this happened, you'd see random explosions all the time. Electron - positron conversion hasn't been detected yet so a simple rotation is definitely not going to be converting electrons to positrons. Hell, if it did we'd have antimatter bombs floating around all over the place.
Re:They'd best be careful (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Believe it when it ships (Score:3, Informative)
Here:
http://newtech.aurum3.com/content/view/58/18/ [aurum3.com]
Re:Basic Quantum Mechanics (Score:3, Informative)
(to nitpick on your post - you can have an electron pair with both Sz components equal - in a triplet state; you get the right commutation rules from an antisymmetric spatial part; anyway, in principle there exist states where all electrons in an atom would have the same Sz number, but good luck on even creating one of them, nevermind stability; as you said, you need different quantum numbers and that eventually means orbital ones - which would yield highly excited states)
Re:Solidisks (Score:2, Informative)
> system. I am not confident you could change the spin of
> anything at that scale for any useful length of time.
> Too many variables and too much "noise". If you want to
> change a property, it needs to be a property that can
> "latch" in whatever state you place it and have no
> trivial way of unlatching itself without significant
> input. Otherwise, your data will degrade very rapidly.
I completely agree - DRAM is absurd. We should have never tried it because it degrades and has to be refreshed constantly. SRAM makes a lot more sense, but not as much sense as FLASH for our RAM.
Of course, DRAM is orders of magnitude cheaper at the same performance level, but that never bothered me. I go with what makes sense to me at the moment.
Andy Out!
Have you shot an RIAA member today?
Re:Solidisks (Score:5, Informative)
Volatile RAM also has to remain powered at all times. Again, this is a GOOD thing. Old-fashioned "core" memories could retain data for a hundred years plus, which made rebooting somewhat of a lengthy process. You would not, for example, build a CPU where the internal registers used "core" memory or any other form of non-volatile memory. At least, not unless you were very drunk.
On the other hand, if you wanted to replace a hard drive, DRAM is next to useless. Sure, you can have a stack of NiCad batteries in parallel to keep the memory going, provided you remember to replace/recharge them as needed. Wouldn't help you, though, if you had a short. For mass storage, where the contents absolutely needs to be retained for a long period of time, you absolutely do NOT want to use DRAM.
When you get right down to it, though, if the CPU had a gig or four of register-speed RAM on board, you wouldn't really want DRAM for anything. Main memory is only useful because it's substantially cheaper than register-speed RAM and it wouldn't be trivial to build a processor big enough to hold that much memory. Main memory, for a long time now, has been treated as little more than a cache for virtual memory, where all the real storage is on disk, and as a dumping ground for what memory the processor does have. If CPUs held enough, and/or mass storage was fast enough, main memory would go the way of the dodo. It's a relic that persists only because the alternatives are too limited right now.
Re:Just A Second (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.physorg.com/news3938.html [physorg.com]
http://www.macromedia.com/go/gnavtray_cfmx_home [macromedia.com]
Re:How do you know we don't? (Score:3, Informative)
The direction that cosmic radiation comes from can be identified. If election -> positron conversions happened, we would be seeing 1 MeV xray/gamma radiation coming from everywhere. People aren't dying of radiation sickness in large numbers, therefore rotating an electron 360 degrees doesn't result in its conversion to a positron.
Actually, it's simpler than that (Score:3, Informative)
I'll dumb the explanation back a bit for the benefit of those (tbh, myself included) who don't have quantum physics as their day job. I.e., if you're a physicist, don't flip out if the terminology isn't just right or the exact equations are missing.
The thing is, the available states for electrons on a given "orbit" are a finite and well defined set. No two electrons may have the same state. I.e., if an atom has 2 electrons (helium), they can't both have the same orbit and state.
The inner layers already have the full set, so there's no way to flit an electron's spin there and still have it stay in that orbit: that would require it to have the same state as another electron there, which is strictly impossible.
The outer layer may have an incomplete set, but that's why mollecules and crystals form. E.g., the reason you find hydrogen as H2 (or bonded to other atoms, of course) and not as individual H atoms, is that they basically share their electrons to form a complete set. Or when you have a mollecule like CH4 (methane), each Hydrogen atom basically gets an electron from the Carbon atom to form its complete set, while the Carbon atom gets an electron from each Hydrogen atom because it needs 4 more to have the full set.
So you could only flip individual electrons from the outer layer if you kept those atoms as free atoms, not part of a mollecule or crystal. Otherwise, again, he'd try to create a situation where two electrons have the same position and state.
So how's he going to achieve that? The only atoms that stay free like that are those which, like say Helium or Neon, already have a full outer set, so they're useless there.
Re:Actually, it's simpler than that (Score:3, Informative)
May I "flip out" (good one) if you're just plain wrong?
If what you've written were correct, ordinary magnetic materials could not exist. We would not see Zeeman splitting of spectral lines.
To bring it down to plain chemistry terms, think about molecular nitrogen and oxygen. How did both of those molecules manage to form "its complete set" when one has more electrons than the other? Even though the electrons are paired up in the molecule, there are still available unfilled states.
I do happen to lean toward the belief that this "invention" in TFA is bunk, but not for your reasons.