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Data Storage Science

Anti-static Polymer Stores Data, Too 116

Posted by CowboyNeal from the super-plastics dept.
Tau Zero writes "The BBC reports that a group of scientists (including Stephen Forrest) have discovered a new use for the anti-static plastic film polyethylenedioxythiophene: storing up to a gigabyte per cubic centimeter. The storage technology resembles an old fuse-link PROM; a bit of polymer between two electrodes conducts electricity when new, but a strong pulse turns it into an open circuit. The polymer is already cheap, and read/write speeds are claimed to be good. The researchers predict that this could be made into working devices in a few years (no word on whether this means devices in the laboratory or retail packages)." Update: 11/29 16:34 GMT by CN : Whoops, we already reported this earlier, and I was fooled into thinking it new by the BBC. Given the slump of news due to the holiday weekend, it's still worth mulling over, though.
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Anti-static Polymer Stores Data, Too More

Anti-static Polymer Stores Data, Too

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  • Dupe (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SiliconEntity ( 448450 ) *
    See http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/12/214622 7 for a link with considerably more detail.

  • Portable MP3 Players (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I already see a use for this as a portable mp3 player. But this stuff rarely pans out as people claim, so I'm not holding out any hope.
    • mod parent up. another useful method for portable mp3 playing is to record the mp3s to cassette, then put the cassette in an mp3-enabled Walkman. it couldn't be easier!@

    • Re:Portable MP3 Players (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Current 2.5" hard-drives have same storage density (60GB with 66.5cm^2) and don't have write restrictions.

      This technology takes at least few years until it's commercially available, and by that time there will be cheap 10-20GB flash cards.

  • Any device resulting from their work would be a "write-once, read-many" format ... They team estimates that working devices could be up to 10 times more dense than current hard disks.

    ...analogous to CD-R (recordable) as opposed to CD-RW (rewritable). How will common file systems and OS designs have to change to accommodate WORM media? Or is this not intended to displace hard disk drives?

    • Still, it is made out of a cheap'n'cheerful plastic. You could have a "sugar-cube" like holder for the device, and just pop a new one in when it has filled up.

      Also, if it's random access and read-only, then you could have a bit somewhere in a "sector" that said 'this has been deleted', so you don't end up with enormous directories, but the data is still all there waiting for that necessary 'restore'....

      Simon

      • You could have a "sugar-cube" like holder for the device, and just pop a new one in when it has filled up.

        In other words, like the memory cube they pulled out of the robot's head in that A.I. movie. But what if your OS is on one cube, the cube is nearly full, and somebody announces a security hole in your web browser? Will the downloaded updates need to spill onto a second cube? If so, will all computers need a whole bunch of cube drives?

      • Still, it is made out of a cheap'n'cheerful plastic. You could have a "sugar-cube" like holder for the device, and just pop a new one in when it has filled up.

        Unfortunately, "plastic" aka polymers does not equal to "cheap" in this case. This is a common misconception. These substances have to extremely pure, which makes them expensive.

        In addition - In my opinion the whole story is a publicity stunt, I fail to see the real advantages.

        -There are many other fuse materials avialable, I do not see the advant

    • Re:WORM: write once, read many (Score:5, Interesting)

      by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @11:45AM (#7587738) Journal
      ...analogous to CD-R (recordable) as opposed to CD-RW (rewritable). How will common file systems and OS designs have to change to accommodate WORM media? Or is this not intended to displace hard disk drives?

      Interesting analogy considering the state of the industry at the moment. Intel is working on a replacement for flash [ebnonline.com] that utilizes chalcogenide - the material used in rewritable disks like CDRW and DVDRW.

      The idea is the same as what we have here except, instead of the "blown fuse" technique, the chalcogenide material stores data as a level of resistance (which can be set/reset trillions of times). Intel believes that this is a successor to flash, which is expected to hit the scalable wall at 45nm (2007-8ish). Because the chalcogenide material can be "programmed" to hundreds of unique levels of resistance, it is expected that Intel will get as much as 8 bits per cell, which will put density into or above that of conventional hard drives.

      So there you have it - DRAM and hard drive replacement in one.

      If you are looking for an investment that leverages this technology, consider Energy Conversion Devices [ovonics.com] out of Rochester, Michigan. The CEO is Stanford Ovshinsky of "Ovshinsky Effect" fame. They invented this technology back in the 60s and Gordon Moore even wrote a paper on it in 1970, I believe. But material technology is only just now beginning to develop to the point that this can become feasible.

      Disclaimer - I am an investor in this company and I consider it EXTREMELY high-risk. The company is currently teetering on the edge of solvency.
      • Well, you should not forget that there are many many competing technologies for a flash successor. Thinks to consider when discussing OUM:

        -Intel (and ST to a minor factor) are the only companies investing into this, all competitors have different technologies.
        -A demonstration of reliable high density operation has still to follow. Handling local temperature differences of several hundrend kelvins within a sold state device poses many problems. Thermal stress will contribute to wear out, characteristics dri

        • Re:WORM: write once, read many (Score:4, Interesting)

          by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @01:03PM (#7588114) Journal
          -Intel (and ST to a minor factor) are the only companies investing into this, all competitors have different technologies.

          Not true - Lockheed Martin [ovonyx.com] is also a developer. I should also note that there are many private developers that won't ever need a license if they ultimately can't create a working/profitable device.

          -A demonstration of reliable high density operation has still to follow. Handling local temperature differences of several hundrend kelvins within a sold state device poses many problems. Thermal stress will contribute to wear out, characteristics drift etc etc..

          Intel has already demonstrated a cycle life of 10^12 and expects data retention of 10 years at 120dC.

          -How about process compatibility.. no mention about this, yet

          Google for this. Intel is throwing the weight of their R&D to OUM because it is so process-friendly. They are currently running OUM alongside the Pentium 3.0Ghz line (not commercially viable / internal R&D use only).

          A brief here... [intel.com]

          Ovonyx non-volatile memory technology offers significantly faster write and erase speeds and higher cycling endurance than conventional Flash memory. It also has the advantage of a simple fabrication process, which allows the design of semiconductor chips with embedded non-volatile memory using only a few additional mask steps.

          Interesting comments from the horse's mouth.

          -Intel is also investing in competing technologies

          Yes - but they are on record (see original EBN link from parent post) stating that OUM shows the most promise. But, as I did state earlier, I see this as extremely speculative. I would not be here if I was not a whore for the technology. I fully expect to do one of two things with my investment:

          1) 100 fold return by 2010
          2) lose it all

          That is what speculation is all about.
          • Not true - Lockheed Martin is also a developer

            LM is not a semiconductor giant.. they probably just supporting it because it is less sensitive to ionising radiation. A characteristic it shares with MRAM.

            Intel has already demonstrated a cycle life of 10^12 and expects data retention of 10 years at 120dC

            1e12 is MUCH too little for practial matters (you mentioned dram replacement), competing technologies are magnitudes ahead. And afaik the tested structures were low density in 0.25 or 0.35 um technology.

    • Re:WORM: write once, read many (Score:5, Interesting)

      by zhenlin ( 722930 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @12:13PM (#7587840)
      Plan 9 in particular uses WORM media for long term storage and as a form of versioning - it uses magnetic rotating disk platters for level-2 caching and volatile RAM for level-1 caching.

      From http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html :
      "The file server has three levels of storage. The central server in our installation has about 100 megabytes of memory buffers, 27 gigabytes of magnetic disks, and 350 gigabytes of bulk storage in a write-once-read-many (WORM) jukebox. The disk is a cache for the WORM and the memory is a cache for the disk; each is much faster, and sees about an order of magnitude more traffic, than the level it caches. The addressable data in the file system can be larger than the size of the magnetic disks, because they are only a cache; our main file server has about 40 gigabytes of active storage.

      The most unusual feature of the file server comes from its use of a WORM device for stable storage. Every morning at 5 o'clock, a dump of the file system occurs automatically. The file system is frozen and all blocks modified since the last dump are queued to be written to the WORM. Once the blocks are queued, service is restored and the read-only root of the dumped file system appears in a hierarchy of all dumps ever taken, named by its date. For example, the directory /n/dump/1995/0315 is the root directory of an image of the file system as it appeared in the early morning of March 15, 1995. It takes a few minutes to queue the blocks, but the process to copy blocks to the WORM, which runs in the background, may take hours.

      There are two ways the dump file system is used. The first is by the users themselves, who can browse the dump file system directly or attach pieces of it to their name space. For example, to track down a bug, it is straightforward to try the compiler from three months ago or to link a program with yesterday's library. With daily snapshots of all files, it is easy to find when a particular change was made or what changes were made on a particular date. People feel free to make large speculative changes to files in the knowledge that they can be backed out with a single copy command. There is no backup system as such; instead, because the dump is in the file name space, backup problems can be solved with standard tools such as cp, ls, grep, and diff.

      The other (very rare) use is complete system backup. In the event of disaster, the active file system can be initialized from any dump by clearing the disk cache and setting the root of the active file system to be a copy of the dumped root. Although easy to do, this is not to be taken lightly: besides losing any change made after the date of the dump, this recovery method results in a very slow system. The cache must be reloaded from WORM, which is much slower than magnetic disks. The file system takes a few days to reload the working set and regain its full performance.

      Access permissions of files in the dump are the same as they were when the dump was made. Normal utilities have normal permissions in the dump without any special arrangement. The dump file system is read-only, though, which means that files in the dump cannot be written regardless of their permission bits; in fact, since directories are part of the read-only structure, even the permissions cannot be changed.

      Once a file is written to WORM, it cannot be removed, so our users never see ``please clean up your files'' messages and there is no df command. We regard the WORM jukebox as an unlimited resource. The only issue is how long it will take to fill. Our WORM has served a community of about 50 users for five years and has absorbed daily dumps, consuming a total of 65% of the storage in the jukebox. In that time, the manufacturer has improved the technology, doubling the capacity of the individual disks. If we were to upgrade to the new media, we would have more free space than in the original empty jukebox. Technology has created storage faster than we can use it. "
    • How will common file systems and OS designs have to change to accommodate WORM media?

      Plan 9 [bell-labs.com] from Bell Labs already has [bell-labs.com].

    • no, but it's pretty useful for logging your suspicious non-american activities!

  • WORM (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bobthemuse ( 574400 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @11:16AM (#7587596)
    strong enough jolt of power it becomes permanently non-conducting

    The only way a new form of permanent media can become popular is if it is much cheaper, faster, and more durable than CD-ROMs.

    Even then, a gig in a block the size of a sugar cube (plus supporting electronics). Already this takes up more space-per-gig than a DVD. What's the advantage?

    • Re:WORM (Score:5, Insightful)

      by splutty ( 43475 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @11:19AM (#7587613)
      Bob wrote:
      Even then, a gig in a block the size of a sugar cube (plus supporting electronics). Already this takes up more space-per-gig than a DVD. What's the advantage?

      Well.. For one thing what would you say about the fact that this technology doesn't use any moving parts? If you just plop some electrodes on it and can read the thing, then you're rid of ridiculous high spinning speeds, laser readers that need to move back and forth at insane speeds, etc.

      Mad.
      • You'd have to either move the electrodes or move the cube to read all each part.

        Either way, you're not better off than now.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • I'll give you a hint....think replacment for usb solid state memory drives, cd-r, zip, and floppy disks, etc...

  • Faster correct link (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29, 2003 @11:18AM (#7587603)
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3245822.stm [bbc.co.uk] (see the 2 in the url denotes international audience , UK traffic is a 1)
  • this abbreviation is giving me second thoughts, perhaps it should not be used to identify this material.

    Although this entire idea sounds promissing, it is not the first time that I hear about storing gigabytes of data in a sugar-cube sized material for read only applications [google.ca]. Somehow they just do not materialize.
    • regarding your signature... what did you think of the movie after having read the book? I think I'd be embarrased to have that on my car since most people would only know about the movie!
      • I don't actually care what most people think, so I don't get embarrased.

        I could have made a much better movie from that book - actually explained something about the planet itself, made a good use of FX where needed (like when the phantom of the girl went through a steel door by smashing into it) etc.

      • Also it gets funny, some people think Solaris is my name and some ask whether I own Sun Microsystems :)

  • Quality over quantity (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Krapangor ( 533950 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @11:21AM (#7587624) Homepage
    I think the fast development of larger and larger data storage containers is actually a very bad thing for society. It causes much more problems than it creates benefits. Let me list some of the basic problems:
    1. Increased storage capacity lead to a decrease of data quality which renders aquired data in the long term basically useless. You might have 100s of pentabytes of data, you'll never have the time and processing power to analyse it or make any sensible use of it.
    2. Increased storage capacity lead automatically to the storage of more data. The storage limits are just reached much faster and you'll be basically again stuck at the storage limits. But this time point 1. kicks in and you have more storage units but much less use for it.
    3. The increased data storage increases the propability of the violation of personal and cooperate privacy by goverment or other 3rd parties. Combined with the automatic effect of point 2. this can lead to an Orwellian society if high storage adaption if faster than the adaption of society - even if the political leaders don't aim for it initially.
    4. Increased data storage makes backup and other storage presevering operation more expensive. This results in lower preserving operations per important data units which results in high loss propabilities. I think I don't have to point out the further consequences.
    At the whole the whole dedication to increasing data storage is in fact a bad thing. Instead we should concentrate our economical forces the enhance data quality which is a more important and harder task. Note further that data storage and data care is basically a low-skilled and personal intensive operation. Such operations can be easily outsourced by high capacity communications channels like the internet to developing countries like India, China or Poland. These techniques have no future in high wage countries like US, Japan or Europe. So a dedication the high-skilled data quality enhanching would make much more sense from an economical point of view.

    • Re:Quality over quantity (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I agree. 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
    • 1. That's not true. I remember that I got my first x86 back in '96, it was a Pentium 100MHz with a 4GB hard drive. Today's common processors are more than 20 times faster than that, but a common drive is around 80GB.
      2. I agree with the first bit, see #1 for the last part.
      3. They're out to get me! They really are!
      4. Increased storage capacity means storage space becomes cheaper, not that it becomes available. I could get 10TB of storage space today, but that doesn't mean I can afford it.

      For somebody of your
      • Ah, but you can't get 15GB of storage space today.
        Seriously, look for it. Hard to get anything under 40GB, really. If the availability of increased storage capacity (and increased chance of failure) means you can't find something smaller and more reliable, is that a good thing?
        • I'll just get a couple of 80GB drives and RAID them. So, yes, it is a good thing, if the prices go down, and they did go down. (Heck, I paid ~USD1400 for that Pentium 100MHz, back then)
          For the few that only need 15GB and reliability, yes, it is a bad thing. But for the majority of us, cheaper/bigger drives are better.
          • Well, for Write-once, read-many, I guess that's right. An ungodly huge drive that is not rewritable would make sense for most activities (turning all your CDs into MP3s, for example), and you'll have a hard time replacing the neccessity of read/write drives. I actually would like WORM to be several leaps ahead of R/W as far as density goes. My box of 275+ backup CDs can attest to my annoyance..
            So, this technology won't actually eliminate smaller R/W drives..

            • Re:4 (Score:2)

              by Tony-A ( 29931 )
              My box of 275+ backup CDs can attest to my annoyance..

              For backups, it's not really Write-once, read-many, it's Write-once, read-seldom. The media does need to be re-readable, but the majority will never be accessed again.

              Ideally, for backup, you want something like 10 times the storage for 10 percent of the cost.

              There should be some way to implement a file system using a large WORM drive and a smaller R/W drive so that the WORM drive stores the unchanging stuff and the R/W drive stores the changing stuf
      • (And the EU, at that!)

        Not yet...

    • Re:Quality over quantity (Score:5, Interesting)

      by drfireman ( 101623 ) <dan.kimberg@com> on Saturday November 29, 2003 @11:49AM (#7587754) Homepage
      I don't believe more data storage may or may not be a bad thing. Although you write that "in fact" it's bad, actually this is your opinion, not an established fact, and certainly not a point of consensus among people who are intimately familiar with the common points you raise.

      More storage capacity can create some problems, and the ones you describe are among them. It also solves some problems, among which are problems that have held back basic scientific and medical research, as well as other fields that some people consider useful.

      Just to address a few points:

      Increased storage capacity can lead to a decrease in average data quality, not the total amount of quality data. So this only renders data useless if you have no way of finding just the data you want, or if you feel obligated to use all of it. In the rare cases that meet these criteria, having smaller storage doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the problem logically impossible to solve rather than logistically (because the data are gone, not just hard to find).

      I find the argument that data will continue to grow fast enough to fill available storage unconvincing. The amount of storage I have now is much more than I had 20 years ago. Just like 20 years ago, I could probably use more disk space, so you're right in that sense. But I'm able to do many more things with that disk space now, like storing music, video, and data for my research. It's not that the same things I was doing before are now taking up more space. It's that the bigger disks I have now have made it possible to store much more of the data I would like to keep. Sure, digital pictures and movies keep sucking up more space. But that's a huge benefit of bigger storage. Right now I'm throwing away a lot of data I'd rather keep, in part because of storage (and in part because my current cameras have sensors that aren't up to it). I really do want these data, and bigger storage is critical to making it possible for me to keep them. The amount of storage I have could easily grow by two or three orders of magnitude without making it the least bit more difficult for me to index my data.

      Lastly, I doubt that data storage is the limiting factor in shepherding us towards an Orwellian future. A few gigabytes of storage for everyone in this country seems like a good start. Mining that data will be difficult. Yet I doubt the mining difficulties are seen by the relevant people as a reason why more storage would be bad.

      In short, I agree that dealing with large amounts of data can be difficult in some cases. I don't agree that it's bad for society.
    • I work for a company, that does, in part, prepress work.

      We keep two versions of each item, one is the Mac files, illustrator, quark, embedded raster art, etc. They are like the "source code".

      Previously we never had the room to effectively store rasterized and print-ready 300 dpi separated files, the "output files". We had a tape based solution, but at the volumes of files we needed every day, it sucked big time. We needed random access.

      When big hard disks became available for cheap, I helped the compa
    • The same argument could be made about energy. Electricy results in electrocution; nuclear power has its own dangers; fire can burn houses down; increased energy consumption results in less efficient energy usage. Let's not waste energy thinking about it though.
    • Quantity has a quality all it's own. In addition since most consumer electronics are made of plastic perhaps the case itself could be the storage medium for low end electronics. Possibly instead of cds companys could release music in the form of a one peice storage/player with headphones (can't pirate digitally if you can't access the data, although there would still be an analog hole) and since its solid state and plastic you could implant with an radio frequency tag under the skin.
      1. The problem of useless data does not scale with available storage space. Either there is useful information in the data or there isn't, it doesn't matter what it's stored on. And remember that data processing speed is also increasing along with storage capacity, and new data-mining techniques are being invented.
      2. Since I don't accept point 1, this is less of a problem. Also, there are applications whose usefulness scales pretty closely with the raw quantity of data that can be stored, like scientific/medica

  • Cheap WORM == ultimate secondary storage (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @11:23AM (#7587637)
    Rewritable storage is only needed if storage space is expensive. If WORM media were spacious enough and cheap enough, it could be used for almost all secondary storage applications except swap space and some rewrite-intensive applications (like video editting). As a side benefit, one would have the ultimate in file archiving -- every version of the file would be retained in WORM media. Many forms of malware would be easily undone by rolling back software, files, etc.

    Why spend extra money for a rewritable storage system if WORM is cheap enough?
    • Yes, but you can write umpteen times on a hard drive, which would mean WORM media would have to be at least a hundred times cheaper than WMRM media for it to be "cheap enough".
      • Yes, but you can write umpteen times on a hard drive, which would mean WORM media would have to be at least a hundred times cheaper than WMRM media for it to be "cheap enough".

        You can write upteen times to a harddrive, but most people don't. Most of the files on my harddrive have only been written once. Files such as system files (except preferences), application executables, digital camera images, copies of old documents, music files tend to be written once. Moreover, most of the files that have been
    • Cheap is one thing. Paper is cheap.

      SPEED is the factor you're overlooking in your smart conclusion.

      Doesn't matter if its cheap, if its slow, its useless.
      • Doesn't matter if its cheap, if its slow, its useless. Very good point! The read access time and read-speed of the WORM needs to be sufficiently high to compete with HD-storage. Write speeds can be much much slower if the system uses another form of memory for caching (e.g., a 10 GB HD in front of a 1000 GB WORM).

  • Science vs. sci-fi (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chalybeous ( 728116 ) <chalybeous@yahooSTRAW.co.uk minus berry> on Saturday November 29, 2003 @11:26AM (#7587648) Homepage Journal

    I never expected to see a development like this; as a sci-fi aficionado, it's quite interesting to see some of the other methods that have been highlighted both fictionally and in the news.
    The first thought that entered my mind was that this could be used, if sufficiently refined, in a similar manner to a USB "keyring drive" - you just carry all your data with you and snap it into a workstation wherever you go. This could well be the same deal... or it could be the basis for those goofy wood-block circuit elements they used in the original Star Trek ;-)
    Or you could make smart cards "smarter"... more info, possibly with a tamperproof MD5 someplace so the information carried on the card can't be faked.

    I do realise that data and Information Technology is becoming an increasing part of our lives, and there's a great drive towards more power and more storage - but what about reducing bloat, increasing security, and making data and software (whether for work, entertainment, whatever) of better quality? It's almost like something out of Philip K. Dick - eventually, we'll drown in our own digital kipple [technovelgy.com] (not to mention landfills consisting wholly of old PC components and AOL CDs)

    Anyone got any idea how this method of storage stacks up against (real and theoretical) things like magnetic, optical, quantum, holographic and crystalline?

    • Video surveillance algorithms now have an extra order of magnitude to deal with/rely on/utilize-for-efficiency.

      "Internet1" (cache of the 'net as it stands today) could be stored in everyones /tmp/public_p2p/ folder.

      Internet2, of course, requires a whole lotta more garbage bags...

  • What about Holographic memory? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by xirtam_work ( 560625 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @11:38AM (#7587697)
    I remember reading in Byte magazine in the late 1980's/early 1990's about IBM's research into Holographic memory, that would be able to read and write entire 'pages' of memory at once in a massively paralell way. Whatever happened to this technology? We are still chasing ever decreasing magnetic bits around. Will Magnetic storage eventually go the way of the dodo and we will be using purely optical storage one way or another within twenty year?

    As well as optical storage (which we already use with spinning discs CD/DVD) optical memory will be able to integrate into optical processors, such as the optical DSP that was recently announced in Israel.

    Would this plastic storage would be sensitive to magnetic damage like a traditional hard disk as well.

    Finally, I read that the Earths' magnetic field can 'flip' every 100,000 years and we're about due for another flip soon. This would cause tremendous damage to all magnetically stored data, as well as plenty of electrical equipment, as it is not a quick clean flip, but equivalent to a massive electromagnetic storm right under our feet - possibly lasting years according to archeological evidence.

    • Re:What about Holographic memory? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Hard disks do not last over geologic periods of time :) You are correct, it is not a quick clean flip...however, the amount of time it takes for these inversions to occur is considerably longer than the life of a hard drive.

    • Someone needs a review of science class (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tau Zero ( 75868 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @12:43PM (#7587994) Journal
      Quoth the poster:
      Would this plastic storage would be sensitive to magnetic damage like a traditional hard disk as well.
      Why would a material whose properties depend on conductivity be affected by magnetic fields? C'mon, think before posting.
      As well as optical storage (which we already use with spinning discs CD/DVD) optical memory will be able to integrate into optical processors
      If you can only scan it at the speed of rotating media, you're way too slow for even secondary storage.
      Finally, I read that the Earths' magnetic field can 'flip' every 100,000 years and we're about due for another flip soon. This would cause tremendous damage to all magnetically stored data, as well as plenty of electrical equipment, as it is not a quick clean flip, but equivalent to a massive electromagnetic storm right under our feet...
      The flip of the poles is on-going, and has been going on for thousands of years. The pole-flip is to EMP (or anything else that might damage magnetic media) as the millimeter/year changes in sea level are to tsunamis.

      (And IMHO, anyone who moderated the parent as "interesting" is even more ignorant than the poster. There are at least three of them with mod points in just one day, and that scares me.)

      • The flip of the poles is on-going, and has been going on for thousands of years. The pole-flip is to EMP (or anything else that might damage magnetic media) as the millimeter/year changes in sea level are to tsunamis.

        I think you may be advocating a specific doctrine on earth development rather than defending scientific research. Scientist are now finding evidence that things can happen very "quickly", and not everything follows the slow, orderly process. This causes problems for many people because it o

        • I think you may be advocating a specific doctrine on earth development rather than defending scientific research. Scientist are now finding evidence that things can happen very "quickly", and not everything follows the slow, orderly process.

          "Quickly", in geologic terms, is thousands of years. The measured rate of the decay of Earth's magnetic field is 0.07% per year [nasa.gov]. You should have known this before posting.

          This causes problems for many people because it opens the possibility that humans might have a

    • Found a link to IBM's work on holographic memory

      http://www.almaden.ibm.com/st/data_storage/nrt/hol ography/ [ibm.com]

      It seems that they moved it from my old bookmark position. It's also come on quite a way since 1990.

    • Holographic memory turns out not to be a good match to today's computers: the data comes out too fast to be useful with current systems and writing takes too long.

      Optical computers have been used in some specialty applications (e.g., optical correlators), but they are not usually cost effective.

      As for a flip of the earth's magnetic field, that's probably not strong enough to damage any media, but it might result in higher radiation levels, with all sorts of unpleasant consequences.
  • I bet the funny thing about using anti-static polymer for data storage, is that it's sensitive to static. One little zap and a gigabyte of data is gone.
  • Being fooled into thinking a story is new by the BBC is like being fooled into thinking a product is secure and efficient by Microsoft. Or, thinking a story is accurate, by CNN.
  • Don't you have some flying cars to invent? It's time to go back to those dusty Popular Mechanics from '54, and work from there.

    I'm guessing this memory goo, e-paper and full bandwidth video phones are in the trunk of the flying car. Kill 10 birds with one stone!

  • Polyester data polymer pants, it'll be the '70's all over again!
  • 1GB/1cc doesn't sound too impressive. Look up 'tesa-rom' on Google, 1TB on a roll of 'magic tape', a common transparent adhesive. Maybe 10cc one.

  • Hold your horses (Score:2, Interesting)

    by gxv ( 577982 )
    Don't be so hasty with putting this memory in your computres and MP3 players. The way from idea to stores is quite long and a lot of ideas don't go beyond the project stage.
    There still are Polymer Memory, Ovionics Unified Memory (OUM), Magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) and ferro-electric RAM (FeRAM) [zdnet.co.uk] There is a lot of intresting memory-related projecs in progress, only time will show which of them are actually useful and will be installed in our future computers.
  • What holiday?

  • Gigabyte per cubic centimeter? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @12:21PM (#7587873) Journal
    Sounds theoretical.

    Theoretically, a 1-cm silicon memory chip stores way more than a GB per cc.

    But good luck stacking them at that density with any hope of reliability.
  • an old fuse-link PROM

    Where do we get this so called fuse-link pr0n?
  • Nobody has ever mass produced a memory technology that wasn't relatively flat in shape. If a cubic centimeter can hold a gigabyte or 2^33 bits, a single layer can probably hold 2^(33*2/3) bits or 256 kb, not taking into account the shape of the cells. If they somehow manage to stack say, 32 layers of this, they'll get 8mb, which is much more realistic and still pretty good for a square centimeter of non-volatile memory.
    • Well, it's an excercise in both space efficiency and ergonomics. 1cm3 cubes aren't easy to manipulate, and you can't write much on them. If it was me, I'd make three designs. One would be the size of a fat CD-case and work like a Zip disk. This would hold about 50cm3 = >50 GB. You'd carry one of them with you, and it'd be your life, until it runs out. For digital cameras and portable Vorbis players (this is the future, remember?), you'd have a smaller thing, like a CF card only with about a GB. A s
    • Nobody has ever mass produced a memory technology that wasn't relatively flat in shape.
      False. Magnetic drum memory systems were mass produced from the 1950s through the 1970s. They were used as the main memory on a few computers (e.g., IBM 650), and as secondary store (e.g., swapping, paging, or for frequently accessed files) on many.
  • This article was on Popular Science a week ago wasnt it?
  • What ever happened to the folks that were recording 10G on a roll of plain ol' scotch tape? Might not be as compact, but the media price is certainly right.

    Scotch Tape Storage [slashdot.org]

    Unfortunately the link in the article is stale.

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