"Colossal Magnetic Effect" Could Lead To Another Breakthrough In Storage Tech 105
Bryant writes "Scientists with the Carnegie Institution for Science have discovered what could bring yet another massive advance in memory and storage. The discovery, a magnetoresistence literally 'up to 1000 times more powerful' than the Giant Magnetoresistence Effect discovered roughly 20 years ago, which led to one of the major breakthroughs in memory, seems to be a result of high-pressure interactions between Manganites. Manganites aren't new to this game; MRAM uses Manganite layers to achieve the Magnetic Tunnel Effect needed to keep the state of memory stable. Applying significant amounts of pressure to known tech-useful materials isn't a new trick; you might recall the recent breakthrough with Europium superconductivity thanks to similar high-pressure antics."
Speed and latency matters (Score:5, Interesting)
However I'd complain about low bandwidth and high latency.
Imagine if you have 100TB drives but they only do sequential transfers at 200MB/sec and are still stuck at about 10milliseconds access time (7200rpm).
What that means: it'll take 6 days to transfer 100TB at 200MB/sec, and random transfer speeds will be about as crap as now (1-2MB/sec).
Re:Storage.... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're thinking home computers, maybe.
For a lot of businesses, 1TB isn't that much. We have systems with well over 1TB of data, to which over 5GB of new data are added every day, with an accelerating rate of new data coming in (as the systems model more fo the business, in more detail, etc.).
Historically these scales have only increased over time, and nothing is evident that would show that slowing down any time soon.
Now, do you want all that storage in one HDD? Probably not; there are pros and cons. But, there are absolutely applications where the desired amount of storage on a device exceeds what you could get today. It's not all about how many movies you can torrent.
It is great but ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Should that Giant Magnetoresistive? Someone else seems to so because the article is tagged "typoinsummary". Google and I haven't heard much about Great Magnetoresistive effect in the past, so unless it's some obscure term...
But hey, it's not my area of expertise and I certainly agree that with the sentiment that this magnetoresistive stuff is rather great!
This is not new (Score:1, Interesting)
Colossal magnetoresistance in manganites are discovered some 15+ years ago.
And this area has been very hot in recently years with tons of papers coming out every month. In fact I did my own masters thesis on this particular topic.
You guys should really check this out, it is so true...
Re:Storage.... (Score:1, Interesting)
You have no idea. Two jobs ago (and 3 years ago), the commercial systems I was working on at a Geophysics place had about 1.3 Petabytes of online, actively accessed hard drive storage.
Re:Storage.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I think by then MRAM [wikipedia.org] will be ready to take over all memory needs and possibly mass storage needs.
MRAM is: Fast like SRAM, less power hungry than DRAM (no refresh!), and keeps its state like flash, but without degrading when written to... Its obvious this will make all other types obsolete.
Re:And if we can predict anything... (Score:1, Interesting)
Even Next Gen consoles will be amazing
The problem with consoles or even PC gaming is the fact that humans have physical limitations in hearing, sight, smell and touch. It is no good having sound systems that produce frequencies beyond the threshold of human hearing and it is rather pointless producing a display that our eyes cannot detect any improvement over a lesser detailed display. Basically that leaves smell and touch to be explored with regard to interaction, however this area is highly subjective.
If you look at improvements in consoles and PC from the 1980's these have been significant however we are now rapidly approaching the limits of human senses and with sound we exceeded what we can possibly hear decades ago, this leaves sight and looking at what is now being produced with PC, PS3 and Xbox360 we are now approaching what human eyes are capable of resolving.
We'll wait till Crysis 2 comes out...
My son has Crysis on his gaming PC and he has a full 1080p (1920x1080 resolution) 24in screen and an excellent sound system. If he changes the Crysis resolution to something less then 1080p you can pick it but it but it not a huge discernible difference. Like wise if I display a game or movie that outputs 1080p to a similarly sized (say 42in) 1080p and also a 720p HDTV you will pick the difference but it is not hugely different. Of course if you increase the screen size to a 55in HDTV the difference is more pronounced. If HDTV manufactures go to higher resolutions you would find that you can have screen sizes of 100in or more but how many living rooms at the moment support this and how close do you want to be from the screen.
I do think that the only way to keep increasing performance in games is to actually heighten human senses and this is going to be a topic that is going to be very interesting in the fairly near future.
Re:Storage.... (Score:1, Interesting)
I work for a company that routinely processes videos of several hours runtime, extracts still images from them etc. Let me tell you that 1 TiB of disk space isn't really that much.
But on top of that, as you correctly point out, it becomes even worse if you start putting houndreds of thousands jpegs on these things and have to find a program that reliably copies and checks them. Hint: Don't try windows explorer. Robocopy works fine as does BeyondCompare. Most others fail somewhere near 150.000 files, which usually happens after several hours into the process and leaves you with an inconsistent state which means you might have to start all over again.
Re:Speed and latency matters (Score:3, Interesting)