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A 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive?
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Feb 16, 2006 10:40 PM
from the peta-unavailable-for-comment dept.
from the peta-unavailable-for-comment dept.
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."
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Petabyte Storage Array 185 comments
knight13 writes "Engadet is reporting that EMC is rolling out a petabyte RAID array. From the article, "And if you're ready for that level of storage, there's now someplace to get it: EMC has launched its first petabyte array, a version of the company's flagship Symmetrix DMX-3 system that includes nine room-filling cabinets of drives." The price? A mere $4 million."
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Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. That sentence didn't make any sense.
2. So my PETABYTES of data don't all go down the tube at once.
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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If 2. did occur (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:If 2. did occur (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Eh? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Just A Second (Score:5, Funny)
That's nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
Thomas is a 30-year pioneer whose projects include a computer with a 3D display, instant response, able to run every available OS and application simultaneously, virtually no power consumption or moving parts and complete security - and whose physical component is about the size of a pack of playing cards.
Now that makes a 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive in 4 years almost believeable!
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Re:That's nothing (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:That's nothing (Score:5, Funny)
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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]
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colosalstorage.com Credibility? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Blast from the past (Score:5, Funny)
Backups, anybody? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Backups, anybody? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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Star Trek? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, they do the stuff with the electrons using Heisenberg compensators.
Re:Star Trek? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:They'd best be careful (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Re:They'd best be careful (Score:5, Informative)
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A million times? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A million times? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Yikes! (Score:3, Funny)
To answer the question (Score:5, Funny)
No, 640 TB should be enough for everyone.
Vaporwate (Score:5, Insightful)
Believe it when it ships (Score:5, Insightful)
Where are the holographics DVDs? A few years out, which is where they were a few years ago.
OLEDs are finally showing up on small displays but remember it was only a few years ago we were promised they would supplant Plasma and LCD in 'just a couple of years?' They might do it someday, but not this year.
And so on.
Re:Believe it when it ships (Score:3, Informative)
Here:
http://newtech.aurum3.com/content/view/58/18/ [aurum3.com]
Re:Believe it when it ships (Score:3, Insightful)
> over the years or anything.
Yes they are. But they probably won't be hundreds of times better in five years, probably not in ten. They will continue their relentless improvement though. That is the point I was making, that when someone promises a single improvement that is hundreds of times better than current tech you should be sceptical because they rarely pan out, at least on the timescales being touted to attract inve
Predictions of "4-5 years away" never are (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, how would you access the data? What bus would be fast enough for storage of that magnitude? How do you back it up, except to other drives of its type? What's the reliability predicted to be like (especially on such a new technology)?
Lots of questions, few answers.
Re:Predictions of "4-5 years away" never are (Score:5, Funny)
117. [google.com]
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Obligatory Jokes: (Score:4, Funny)
"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 (Score:5, Funny)
Is that before or after rebate?
All your eggs... (Score:3, Informative)
No. Thank you.
1.2 Petabyte equals (Score:5, Interesting)
1/74th of Data's full storage capacity on Star Trek
1/45th of all the files shared on Kazaa
1/3rd of Google's total storage capacity
Half a Vista installation
938,249,922 Floppy disks
208 KB of storage for each person on this planet.
Re:1.2 Petabyte equals (Score:4, Insightful)
And as everyone knows, 208kB should be enough for anybody.
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Fun with sci-fi and exponential growth (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting, I've never heard that one before (yup, a non-Trekkie on Slashdot). So Data's got about 90PB of storage. Seems insane, right?
It's always neat to see what sci-fi authors think is going to be some insanely huge number, and neater to see how quickly those estimates seem quaint.
I just re-read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In it, the intelligent computer, who can perfectly simulate human voice, display a real-time, photorealistic face with
Re:Fun with sci-fi and exponential growth (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps that's what he meant, but if you were to take this as actual decisions based on weighing any number of factors, you could be talking about a *lot* of clock cycles per decision.
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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: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 st
Just in time for MS Word 2010 to ship! (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah but after (Score:3, Funny)
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#.22Marke
You've got to be kidding me! (Score:5, Insightful)
This place is starting to have the editorial standards of the National Enquirer...
Arthur C. Clarke on Petabytes... (Score:5, Interesting)
the quality of Snake Oil is really taking a dive (Score:5, Insightful)
The basic problem is: you can't identify individual electrons. No way. Not ever. When they're circling an atom they're not discernible particles per se- they're an anonymous and homogenous cloud of probability. You can apply some energy and peel one electron off, but it's not like you're picking a particular electron. It's not like a bag of marbles and you're picking a particular one of a particular color. It's more like a jar of molasses and you're scooping out a spoonful.
Also electron spin isnt something that's latched to any one electron. Electrons exchange virtual photons many millions of million of times per second, which scrambles their properties.
So to beat this dead horse again: there's absolutely nothing to this story.
Solidisks (Score:5, Interesting)
I would also question the usefulness of the proposed 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.
There are two ways to "store" data - permanently or erasably. Permanent storage is much simpler, in that there need not be any way of reversing the process. It's better to do this in a mechanical form, because you can have a much higher density. Erasable storage is better as solid-state, because erasable mechanical storage will wear out rapidly, which means it's not particularly reliable or trustable over meaningful periods of time.
Permanent storage that is high density is relatively simple. You could have a mix of two molecules which are highly stable but, when energy is delivered, react to form something different. Since different molecules absorb energy at different wavelengths, the absorption pattern would give you your 1s and 0s. Molecules are extremely small, compared to magnetic fields or even to the "blisters" formed on CDROMs to store data. You can also look at multiple bits at the same time, with this method. Unlike conventional magnetic media, a read-head need not be serially streaming data but could read as much in parallel as you liked. This WOULD be permanent, though, so would only be useful as a means of replacing CDROMs or DVDs, but would be far more expensive per byte of data and would only offer an advantage where you needed such a system to be considerably faster and vastly more durable.
Erasable non-volatile storage is a tougher problem, as you need something that can be altered by an electric current in both directions and where the change could be read through some alteration in an electric current. This can get to be a problem, if you want extremely high densities of storage, as all the supporting electronics will take space and will likely take space for each and every single bit of data. (Pun intended.) Usually, there is some magnetic component to such systems (magnets are good at holding states) OR a battery backup, as transistors won't hold a state when there is no power to them. There are many ways of building such an arrangement, with different methods having different speeds for read and write and different densities of storage.
I would assume that one could (ab)use "electron migration" to store information, provided an easy way of resetting the electrons existed. This would have the benefit of not needing any magnetic mechanisms (which may mean you could get higher densities) but it would certainly be slower to write to, and likely to read from. I would suspect that something similar will offer much better opportunities for solid-state non-volatile storage in the future, precisely because it should be capable of far higher densities.
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Re:Solidisks (Score:4, Insightful)
I would assume that one could (ab)use "electron migration" to store information, provided an easy way of resetting the electrons existed. This would have the benefit of not needing any magnetic mechanisms (which may mean you could get higher densities) but it would certainly be slower to write to, and likely to read from. I would suspect that something similar will offer much better opportunities for solid-state non-volatile storage in the future, precisely because it should be capable of far higher densities.
If I recall from engineering school, this is how flash memories work; a charge is "trapped" in the gate oxide of a MOSFET (thereby making the MOSFET conduct or not when the data is read), and with current technologies can stay there for several years. The issue (besides write speed, caused by parasitic gate capacitance) is the relatively low number of write cycles before the gate oxide begins to fail. I forget the exact mechanism, but I assume it does have to do with electromigration (as opposed to electron migration) causing the trapping layer in the gate oxide to eventually puncture through to the substrate.
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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.
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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.
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Re:That's a lot.. (Score:3, Funny)
At that point, one has to ask why bother with compression?
Re:Immune to failure? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Thomas is a 30-year pioneer whose projects include a computer with a 3D display, instant response, able to run every available OS and application simultaneously, virtually no power consumption or moving parts and complete security - and whose physical component is about the size of a pack of playing cards."
I think I was just trolled by this article.
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