IBM Says Polymer Memory Could Be Ready By 2005 145
prostoalex writes "Polymer memory is hardly anything new, and we already had HP and Princeton announcing their prototype. In a Forbes magazine article IBM promises polymer memory that's five times cheaper than current flash memory, and expects the first devices with polymer data storage systems to be delivered possibly by 2005. IBM's Zurich Lab published this article last year with description of Millipede."
Mmhmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Just checking.
Hmmm. Cheap long term storage? (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Cheaper than flash or HDs.
2. More durable than flash or HDs (or even CD/DVDs)
3. Be faster than flash/HDs/optical media.
By the time this stuff comes out, trying to beat one of the three is going to be tough - by that time all of those existing technologies will be VERY mature. I'm already able to buy hard drives for super-cheap, so logically, flash is the intended target. The question is, by the time this stuff comes out, will hard drives become so tiny, cheap, and robust, that it's not flash that is the main competitor, but magnetic hard drives?
Of course, if IBM wants to give me petabytes of super-stable long-term storage that will fit in a shoebox, and only cost me a few hundred dollars, who am I to argue? At the very least, if it can replace tape, that might be enough to ensure a place for it, assuming optical hasn't totally displaced that market by then...
Ram _I_ want to see. (Score:5, Interesting)
Millipede Project (Score:5, Interesting)
I must say everybody in the audience was really impressed: from one side the technological aspects, bordering on nanotechnology, were very interesting. Seeing almost the same principle of vinyl discs miniaturized is really fascinating.
The other really interesting point is the impact that such a storage system will have for our systems.
Imagine, you have 10 Tb of space: what will change in the way you handle data? Probabily the first impact will be the disappearance of the deletion of files: why not keep all the old versions of a file if you have all this space? We could use it as we use packet writing on a CDRW. Or what if your iPod could store some Terabytes of data and restit to a lot more of shock (acceleration)?
The speaker made clear that the storage capacity is huge, but the performances are more or less the same of an HD from today: still the Millipede is highly parallelizable.
I think we must see these new storage technologies not merely as bigger HD, but as something different, with lot of space, but with a bit less of performance.
If you see it from a business perspective, remember that IBM sold its HD division to Hitachi about one year ago: it seems clear that they are going to concentrate themselves on new storage technologies.
Anyway, the future looks really interesting!
Re:Hmmm. Cheap long term storage? (Score:4, Interesting)
As for CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, I burn a lot of them because they're so damn cheap. But I hate it. I once scraped off the surface of a CD-R coaster and almost cried at how easy the stuff flaked off. Not to mention there's no reasonable consensus as to how to properly label [slashdot.org] the damn things. I mean, you can't write on them, you can't label them...the only thing you can do is take a tiny sharpie and write on the inner circle, which doesn't do me much good. Even though there would be cost and size increases, I would love it if CDs and DVDs had caddies a la Mini Discs.
Yes, I agree these technologies are cheap and mature but I really wish there was some alternative. So, I for one welcome our new micro-millipede masters (terrible name, btw, I have centipedes in my apartment and they freak the hell out of me even though I know they're good to have around 'cause they eat other bugs).
Astounding leaps in storage technology (Score:1, Interesting)
Dark Angel, look out! (Score:3, Interesting)
I keep thinking: I want to record something about myself for future generations that will, in one form or another, survive. Right now my best bet for that is printing onto acid-free paper and having it bound, or doing microfiche. This potentially could solve that problem!
Bandwidth matters. (Score:2, Interesting)
Devices always make a practical tradeoff between the bandwidth requirements of the data stream and the computing power required to decode the stream's frames.
Incidentally, I learned a lot about the different compression schemes out there. Thanks for your prompt
- Roey
Notes:
1. I looked up the USB spec but couldn't verify whether it is synchronous or asynchronous (and even then if it uses start and stop bits), so I assumed it uses start and stop bits. It shouldn't make that big a difference anyway.
2. DivX
3. Universal Serial Bus Wiki page [wikipedia.org]
4. CCIR-601 Wiki page [wikipedia.org]