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Data Storage Hardware IT Technology

Scientists Perfect Technique To Create Most Dense, Solid-State Memory in History that Could Soon Exceed the Capabilities of Current Hard Drives By 1,000 Times (newatlas.com) 176

Posted by msmash from the breakthrough dept.
New submitter weedjams shares a report: Scientists at the University of Alberta have demonstrated a new data storage technique that stores zeroes and ones by the presence (or absence) of individual hydrogen atoms. The resulting storage density is an unparalleled 1.2 petabits per square inch -- 1,000 times greater than current hard disk and solid state drives, and 100 times greater than Blu-rays. The researchers, led by PhD student Roshan Achal and physics professor Robert Wolkow, built on a technique previously developed by Walkow that used the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to remove or replace individual hydrogen atoms resting on a silicon substrate.

The inconceivably small dimensions (a hydrogen atom is only half a nanometer in diameter) allow for an astounding data storage density of 1.1 petabits (138 terabytes) per square inch. By comparison, a Blu-ray disk can "only" store about 12 terabits of data in the same area (one hundredth the data density), while both traditional magnetic hard drives and solid-state drives store somewhere in the region of 1.5 terabits per square inch (a thousandth of the density). This development, says Achal, could allow you to store the entire iTunes library of 45 million songs on the surface of a US quarter-dollar coin.

Achal and his team demoed the technology by creating a 192-bit cell, which they used to store a simple rendition of the Super Mario Bros video game theme song. To show the rewrite capabilities, the scientists also created an 8-bit memory cell which they used to store the letters of the alphabet one by one, represented via their respective ASCII code. Further reading: ScienceDaily, and Nature.
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Scientists Perfect Technique To Create Most Dense, Solid-State Memory in History that Could Soon Exceed the Capabilities of Curr More

Scientists Perfect Technique To Create Most Dense, Solid-State Memory in History that Could Soon Exceed the Capabilities of Curr

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  • Opportunity: (Score:3)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @03:23PM (#57014714) Homepage
    Record video of everything you say and do in your entire life.

    • Re:Opportunity: (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pablo_max ( 626328 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @03:30PM (#57014752)

      It seems likely that Apple will still start out with 32Gb installed, and charge an extra 80% for 1Tb, even though the costs are pennies.

    • I vaguely remember an Isaac Asimov? book with that theme in it.
    • From multiple perspectives including but not limited to family, relatives and friends. With audio tracks in most languages with subtitles. Accounting each and every requirement in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

      Even though for most individuals, no one including the individual doing it would never look at it again.

      Just my 2 cents ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      No way. This is just another "magic" storage technology that will never materialize in a product that actually works.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Never is a long time, but I wouldn't expect a consumer product this decade or next. Controlling the accuracy of reads and writes that finely is not going to be easy. Still, it sounds like a capacious non-volatile memory, so it might someday be developed.

  • Imagine, more porn than one can possibly watch in a lifetime in the palm of my hand

  • Soon? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by msauve ( 701917 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @03:27PM (#57014728)
    They've stored 192 bits in a lab, and they're claiming that all of iTunes could fit on a quarter "soon?" Are they also selling bridges?

    • With all these storage enhancements I read about the time it takes for them to come out and be tested. useful and affordable. Comes in during the normal trending of storage.

      20 years ago. My System had a 1 Gig drive. which was standard amount. 20 years later 1 TB drives are standard. 1000x improvement. same form factor.

      • Re: Soon? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by c6gunner ( 950153 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @03:57PM (#57014970) Homepage

        20 years is a more likely timeline.

        The scientists involved here said "5-10 years with proper funding", which is a science euphemism for "cover my next funding cycle and then we will see". If the technology is viable and there aren't any serious unexpected hurdles to overcome, expect it to be 20 years by the time it hits the market.

      • Maybe about 5-7 years ago, but it seems that storage has leveled off. HDD and SSD prices have been almost unchanged in the past two years.

        I have read about storage density improvements for years now. However, prices and capacity are basically unchanged since 2016. When stuff changes in the marketplace, what is when I might care.

    • Re:Soon? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ed_1024 ( 744566 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @04:11PM (#57015062)
      The thing that gets my goat is the headline *Scientists Perfect Technique* when that is not at all what they have done. Its a demonstration of what _might_ be possible given a huge amount of R&D and Im pretty sure these particular scientists did not claim to have perfected anything. It would have been fine to introduce the subject with any hyperbole at all and would have still been exciting to read...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      "Soon" means nothing. It's the go to marketing buzzword when you don't have any idea, but want the free marketing attention that is journalists who have no idea how anything works.

    • 'Soon' is one of those great words that can mean whatever you want it to mean. I have no doubt in my mind this technology will be available to the consumer "soon" when thinking in historical timescales, even 'very soon' on geological times scales, where written language was followed up very quickly by the internet.

    • We've been hearing this same line of bullshit for years and it never pans out. Someone in a lab has a "breakthrough" and surprise surprise it never amounts to anything. It used to be 3d holographic storage was going to make magnetic media obsolete. I'll believe it when I can buy it from a store.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Probably will not materialize, ever. The history of storage tech is full with "magic" solutions that never worked.

  • And with the average broadband in the US being about 50Mb/s DL and 5 UP, I guess it should take a while to fill with content.
    Not to mention, Cock (or is it Cox?) will surely throttle your connection long before you ever get the chance.

    • And with the average broadband in the US being about 50Mb/s DL and 5 UP, I guess it should take a while to fill with content.
      Not to mention, Cock (or is it Cox?) will surely throttle your connection long before you ever get the chance.

      It will be cheaper to have the contents of the internet delivered to your house via snail mail once a week.

      • To clarify... that is- once storage gets so small (and cheap)

      • Re:Current broadband (Score:5, Informative)

        by buravirgil ( 137856 ) <buravirgil@gmail.com> on Thursday July 26, 2018 @03:47PM (#57014892)

        It will be cheaper to have the contents of the internet delivered to your house via snail mail once a week.

        Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
        ~ Andrew S. Tanebaum, creator of Minix

        • Mind you, the latency sucks donkey balls.
          ~ A. Turing, creator of tests

          • I've done it. I have offsite backups at my son's place. They've been building incrementally for years now. I wanted to migrate from EXT4 to ZFS and upgrade the H/W while I was at it. In order to complete the work, I created a local copy of the remote filesystem and put it on an 8TB external HDD. It took hours. Then I took it to my son's place and loaded it on the remote system. The data set is over 3TB and would have taken way way too long to transfer over the Internet with the upload caps that Comcast exer

    • perhaps. no telling where speeds will be down the road, but yeah, you'll eventually have the entire output of the mpaa, riaa, library of congress and every smokin southern gal's bitchin fried green tomaters and mint julep recipes on your single little homedrive, all waiting to be cloned in person by your new found pals, all more than willing to return the favor of course. viva the new p2p sneakernet.

  • Blu-ray storage density? (Score:5, Informative)

    by ERJ ( 600451 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @03:32PM (#57014764)
    Cool tech if they can make it an actual product but I am getting hung up on their storage density of Blu-ray disks. Since when can a Blu-ray disk store 12 terabits of data per square inch? As far as I am aware the largest disks store 128GB of data on a what my quick back of the envelop calculations show to be around 12 square inches.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by joshgs ( 71451 )

      I was thinking the same thing. Don't tell the movie companies, can you imagine how many more previews they will add before each movie?

    • Redundancy error correction I expect is used for some of that space.
      Being that normal consumers will but some wear on these things scratches and the like can kill a lot of data when you have 12 terabits per square inch.

      • Redundancy error correction I expect is used for some of that space.

        Quick back of the envelope math says that the difference between the claimed capacity and his observed capacity means that you could have 140 copies of the data on that disc. That's some serious redundancy.

    • Yeah their numbers seem pretty far off. I think they say 12Gbit/in sq and read it as 12 Tbit/in sq

    • A Blu-Ray disc is 4.7 inches in diameter, which is 3.14*2.35*2.35 = 17.34 square inches.

      But here's where the "cheat" comes in; they use multiple layers in the higher capacity Blu-Ray disks. I believe the 128GB ones 4 layers? So that's really almost 70 square inches to store that data...
      =Smidge=

      • Apparently, they can only use 16 square inches of that. The areal density of a blu ray layer is 12.5 Gbits / square inch. Each layer holds 25 GBytes. (25*8)/12.5 = 16 square inches of area. Frankly, I'm surprised they can use that much.

        Newer tech has allowed them to reach 100GB using three layers with the Ultra Blu Ray. There is also a 4 layer spec for the 128GB.

        If the article was interpreting layers as density, it would take near 1000 layers to boost blu ray's native 12.5 gigabits/ square inch to the 12 Tb

    • Since when can a Blu-ray disk store 12 terabits of data per square inch?

      I am not them, but I assume that they mean that the technology is capable of that in a lab environment. When the process is moved into a mass manufactured product, that theoretical limit is lowered ... substantially.

      Or, maybe they messed up their units. *shrug*

  • Nintendo will want $100M for that Super Mario Bros usage.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @03:41PM (#57014836)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • I mean, there have been hundreds of similar news over the years and how many of those have actually materialized into a useful product? A tiny, miniscule fraction, that's how many.

      The methods and R&D from many such advancements have made it into many products you take for granted already. Just because each company doesn't launch it's own standalone product doesn't mean you aren't using the fruits of many of these R&D announcements you have heard.

  • Off by an order of magnitude (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I really feel the need to point out that a hydrogen atom does not, in fact, have a diameter equal to half a nanometer. It's 0.05 nm.

  • Terrible Performance Scaling (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26, 2018 @03:44PM (#57014864)

    I've heard about these techniques before. Atomic Force Microscopes, DNA storage, they all have the same problems. Incredible storage densities but the ability to read and write quickly is missing.

    In order to commercialize this technology you have to overcome the bottleneck of terrible I/O speeds. Oh, and you need to incorporate an atomic microscope into your storage device. That is not great for commercialization prospects.

    Short of that, these storage systems are only good for offline data storage, and situations where exceptionally high density must be achieved at any cost.

  • Unless they overcome the access speed issues listed in the article, it is going to be much slower than existing storage methods. But this could be used as a long term storage layer, below a faster SSD.

    • Just parallel a bunch of 192 bit cells. Access speed issue overcome.

  • Exotic design.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @03:49PM (#57014902) Homepage

    Scientists at the University of Alberta have demonstrated a new data storage technique that stores zeroes and ones by the presence (or absence) of individual hydrogen atoms

    In other words a exotic design that barely works in the lab, with no chance of working in the real world. But give us 20 years and we might have something.

    Didn't we hear the same thing about some holographic crystal storage 20 years ago?

    • for $190. It was a good price. I just bought a 500 gig SSD for $150, and I could have had a fast 1 terabyte platter drive for $60.

      Maybe this won't be the next storage solution, but maybe it will. You never know. But we've increased storage by 70-140x while adjusting for inflation dropped the price massively. I can't complain really. I say let the boffins work :).

    • Holding up one example of a failed delivery doesn't negate that in the past 20 years we have seen over a 1000x increase in storage density for similar R&D anouncements dismissed. You dismissed holographic storage, others dismissed SMR, incidentally the holographic made it out of the lab, but never realised as cost effective. It was further developed into the HVD format which also showed promise right until a competitor showed you can start layering many optical medium layers together.

      These technologies

  • Speed (Score:2)

    by dtmos ( 447842 ) *

    Besides reliable operation at room temperature, the biggest issue with atomic-scale memories [arxiv.org] always has been read and (especially) write speed, since they use an atomic force microscope. It will be interesting to see how the technology develops to overcome these limitations.

  • Users will still find a way to burn up the drive space in no time at all. Speaking as a storage admin.

  • Where are these multi terabyte blu rays tfs refers to? this summanry is nonsense. Also the first and second paragraphs says basically the same. how do you read and write this "memory"

  • Back in the day when Slashdot was a new thing and I recently purchased a 5 GB drive, my friend and I would bring over a collection of media and we would see how quickly we could fill the new drive. Less than a few hours.

    We repeated the experiment when I upgraded to a 13 GB drive and again when I moved up to a 20 GB drive and later to a 250 GB drive.
    I haven't done such an experiment in a long long time, but to do such again would be tempting.

    I doubt my cable provider would like me if I did this over the wir

  • Science giveth, Science taketh away (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @03:53PM (#57014954)

    a technique previously developed by Walkow that used the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to remove or replace individual hydrogen atoms resting on a silicon substrate.

    Wow, a chip the size of my thumbnail that can hold 2.8 LOCs!

    Too bad the reader will be the size of an 80's Dell desktop.

    • And back in the day, 5 megabyte hard drives were the size of dishwashers. What's your point?
  • In other news, scientists have created a better battery! Or was it a mouse trap? I'll get my hopes up when I can buy it. Getting tired of all this sensationalist crap that never see's the light of day.

  • Wait a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Thursday July 26, 2018 @03:54PM (#57014962) Homepage Journal

    The described procedure is not easily scaled. It has been known for a long time that you could push individual atoms around with a needle, at least 10 years ago IBM produced an IBM logo made of individual atoms. This sets a theoretical record, for densest relatively static medium. I guess subatomic and field versions might go smaller.

    But this is not at all about practical storage. To have that, you don't only need a small medium, you need a way to address large amounts of it efficiently, and access the addressed bits to read or write them.

  • Scientists at the University of Alberta have demonstrated a new data storage technique that stores zeroes and ones by the presence (or absence) of individual hydrogen atoms.

    That's kind of a tight tolerance there ... not much room for error, ya know ...

  • I am happily surprised to learn that current commodity technology is within 1000x of manipulating individual atoms. That's amazing for anybody who worked with shoebox-sized 5MB drives.

  • Demonstrating a technology is a long ways from perfecting a technology...

  • I thought the article was light on information until I watched the embedded video. Wow.
  • Color me skeptical, but I'm still waiting for Page Oriented Holographic Memory. I'm looking at you January 1991 issue of Byte Magazine! You got my hopes up and still no trillions of bits on a microscope slide.

  • The resulting storage density is an unparalleled 1.2 petabits per square inch [...] The inconceivably small dimensions (a hydrogen atom is only half a nanometer in diameter) allow for an astounding data storage density of 1.1 petabits (138 terabytes) per square inch.

    So, is it 1.1 or 1.2 petabits per square inch?

    This development, says Achal, could allow you to store the entire iTunes library of 45 million songs on the surface of a US quarter-dollar coin.

    Not sure which one is more mind-boggling... that there'

  • "100 times greater than Blu-Ray" is wildly incorrect. Blu-ray is about 12.5Gb per square inch; 1.2Pb would therefore be an areal density nearly 100,000 times greater than Blu-Ray.

  • Last time I heard it's nearly impossible to contain hydrogen as it leaks almost through everything. Good luck reading your data years after it was stored.

  • Mind boggling, really? For me, 300 MPH is mind boggling... my mind would absolutely boggle if I could get up to that on the freeway. Mind boggling is really not a term that belongs in a Slashdot summary. It doesn't tell us much. Our minds are sufficiently boggled by matter travelling at relativistic speeds, thank you, could you please say it that way? Oh I forgot, the editor just cut and pasted this from the original article, which was aimed at knuckledraggers.

  • Announcing in Slashdot a technological breakthrough seems to be the death knell of said breakthrough. My expectation: it will amount to nothing. In a few months, everybody will have forgotten about it.
  • Hey yeah, tiny. You only need one of these: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/hist... [ibm.com]

  • Hydrogen Bohr radius is half an Angstrom.

    0.05 nanometers

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