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A Terabyte of Data on a Laptop Hard Drive 233

Posted by timothy from the pleasant-daydream dept.
KaosConMan writes: "TechnologyReview.com has an article describing a new technique being developed by General Electric and IBM to further decrease the size needed to magnetically store data. This new technique could produce 150 gigabits per square centimeter-- that's ~57,000 songs on an iPod or a terabyte on a laptop size hard drive!"
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A Terabyte of Data on a Laptop Hard Drive More

A Terabyte of Data on a Laptop Hard Drive

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  • cool. I mean, hot (Score:3, Funny)

    by kipple ( 244681 ) on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @01:44AM (#3767440) Journal
    I wonder
    1. how much does that thing heat up
    2. how in hell I'm going to back up a terabyte from my laptop. I already have there too many things that I care about (I do backups on cd-rw), but with a terabyte of data I'd better have two of them and go with raid.....
    • 1. Yes. Do care about the temperature. And the
      power consumption. And the NOISE!

      2. Don't care about the backup. The good thing about having a terabyte of data is that the need for network connections at awkward places now gets minimised.


      Think about it. You have
      In other words: Have instant access to archives of mail, news, movies, music, i.e. instant access to your backups as they are on your drive!


      Put everything in a gigantic CVS and make the laptop just a cvs-mirror. Not the master.
      Wouldn't it be good with just one big CVS?

      • "instant access to your backups as they are on your drive!"

        So what happens when the drive dies on you? It has been known to happen... so all your 'backups' just died too, huh?
    • That's the thing. When you back up your computer (if you do), do you clone the whole drive, or do you get rid of the replacable stuff?

      Games these days take up a gig for install. Why would you want to back up canned data like textures or default files from a popular OS? I'm waiting for these cd games to take DVD forms and install a few gigs of data in textures.
      • i agree with you... i have many files such as divx movies, mp3 files, and (misc) jpg's :)... these i dont need to backup becaue although losing them sucks its not totally crucial... well maybe the jpg's can stay... they are so small :)...
    • 1. how much does that thing heat up

      It gets hella hot with the amount of pr0n you can fit on a terabyte!

    • Re:cool. I mean, hot (Score:2, Informative)

      by jonelf ( 99217 )
      I don't see why a hd would heat more just because it's stores more? Magnetic media doesn't have to be refreshed like RAM.

      To adress your second concern I would say that the only viable solution for home computing backups has been to backup to another hd for a couple of years now. Backup systems that handles hundreds of GBs are just way too expensive. I solved the problem by just backing up my mail, documents, projects and so on (300MB). The other 50GB I can download from my friends if I ever get a total crash...

      The current implementations of NTFS and ext2fs is said to handle 2TB. Figure running a defrag on such a beast!
      • hard disks get bigger and faster, spinning around with more and more rpm - thus generating heat.

        a 2Tb data will have to be FAST... accessing 2tb with actual speeds will be a pain.. I suppose.

        • Re:cool. I mean, hot (Score:2, Informative)

          by jonelf ( 99217 )
          Not necessarily because higher density means that you will cover more data at the same speed.

          Today we have 160GB disks with under 10ms seek time. 1TB isn't that far off and you could always increase the number of heads.
    • RAID is no substitute for backups (and vice versa). For example: what if you are a little too light on the 'rm -rf'? However, with a second terabyte harddrive you can of course do real backups to the other drive. Think of how many DAT tapes that drive makes up for. So, I would go with three drives: two for the RAID, and a third for backups.

    • Re:cool. I mean, hot (Score:2, Informative)

      by chamenos ( 541447 )
      Well,

      1.The reason hard drives have been getting hotter and noiser, is due to the rpm getting higher and higher, in order to increase the data transfer rate. Now, since what this new technology does is increase the density of data stored on the hard drive by about 10 times, and subsequently by almost 50 times, more data would be able to be read by the read/write heads of the hard drive in one pass. Therefore, the hard drives's data transfer rate would increase when operating at the same rpm as your current hard drive, without needing to get any faster. The data transfer rate would still be faster even if you slowed it down by a bit. So basically, the hard drive probably wouldn't get any hotter than what's available today, since there's no need for the rpm to increase and even if it does get faster (and thus, hotter), the noise and heat increase caused by the faster rpm would be well be worth it when considering the very substantial increase in the resulting data transfer rate.

      A 5,400rpm 160GB hard drive would have a higher transfer rate than a 7,200rpm 20GB hard drive, assuming they both use the same number of discs and read-write heads, etc. If what IBM & GE predict comes true, then such a hard drive with the predicted initial 10 times increase in data density would only have to spin at around 540rpm, in order to get the data transfer rate as the 5,400rpm 160GB hard drive I mentioned earlier. This is of course assuming the storage capacity remains the same (160GB). Therefore, noise and heat would both go down since this imagined hard drive of mine would spin at one tenth the speed of a 5,400rpm hard drive, which is already considered slow now.

      2.That's assuming you do store a terabyte on your laptop. And it does state in the article that the technology is predicted to be ready for the market by around 2008. By then, I think it would be very safe to assume that optical storage would have made substantial leaps and bounds by then. Most probably, by that time 27GB writable or re-writable blu-ray discs might have already become commonplace and backing up a terrabyte hard drive wouldn't be much harder than backing up a 45GB hard drive today with 700MB CD-R or CD-RW discs. Easier, in fact.

      Basically, if this new technogloy works as planned, I really don't see how its going to pose any new problems that we don't already have with magnetic data storage. In fact it would more likely alleviate and lessen some of the problems we do have, such as the problems of noise and heat. Power consumption might go up though, due to the smaller footprint of the bits being stored and hence the stronger amplification needed to read the bit, though a lower rpm might make up for this (suspected) increase in power consumption. However I'm not too sure about this, so someone correct me or enlighten me if I'm wrong. Also, seek times might go up but then again, they will most probably have solved this problem as well by the time this new technology becomes available.

      In conclusion, you either aren't familiar with how hard drives work, or haven't yet read the article properly. In either case, your fears are rather unfounded.
      • Seek time is important too, which is a combination of head-travel speed and roational latency.

        This will give them a reason to keep the RPMs up. If they drop them, for instance for 540, that'd that about 111ms for the disk to rotate to the right spot to be read. Not a killer, once, but when the data becomes fragmented it's unacceptable.

        In the old days they had drives with multiple sets of read heads, spaced evenly around the drive. I figure we'll go back to this some day, when the heat from multiple heads is less than the heat from increasing the speed.

        Adding a second head would let them have speed equivalent to a 7200rpm drive in a 3600rpm one. With four heads that would be equivalent to a 15k-rpm drive...

  • No one needs a hard drive that big (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @01:46AM (#3767444)
    20 meg hard drives should be enough for anyone. Anything more will just be wasted.
    • I don't know about you, but 20Gb goes pretty fast, i mean, once you start dual or triple booting (I've had up to 4 OS's on my system at once). That, and any av takes up tons of space.

      -OS sig, contribute here [sourceforge.net]
    • Also, think of it this way. 150GB per square centimeter, think of a hardrive smaller than the palm of your hand. It could store prolly store gigabyte after gigabyte of data.. Think of one the size of your whatch, thats 150GBs right there.
    • I know this one fellow who edits and stores video material, films and television shows in his spare time. I assure you from having seen him work; 20Gb is just about enough to make you want to pull your hair out!

      As for myself. . . Using pseudo-careful space management, I've never hit a wall with my trusty old 10 Gb drive. --And I regularly use my machine to do significant high-graphics print publishing jobs. Basically, computers have already hit the point where I no longer care how they advance, (just so long as they don't get any more 'user friendly'!). --PC's finally achieved a level of functionality about six years ago where they could do everything I needed quickly, easily at chump-change prices.

      And that's the future, baby!


      -Fantastic Lad --When is the Phantom Editor going to make a Clone of Clones? I'd love to see that film done right!

  • um..hmm..guess that saying doesn't apply anymore

  • What about the fine print? (Score:3, Funny)

    by ErikTheRed ( 162431 ) on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @01:48AM (#3767450) Homepage
    As in, if you use them or more than eight hours a day, do they die within three months like a half-dozen of my "deathstar" drives have done?
  • What are the limitations of flash RAM? At some point will we be able to rid ourselves of all these moving parts?
  • Apart from pr0n divx rips, I imagine it would be very hard to use up 1 terabyte of storage. I am quite happy with about ~60 gigs for everything in my home (65% of that free space is doing nothing). This is spanned over multiple hard drives with multiple operating systems. I wonder what kind of sane person would need that much store on a laptop?
    • If there's one thing I've learned over the years, its that no matter how large my hard drive, I'll quickly learn to fill it up and need more space. So I've got a terabyte of space? I'll start ripping my music CDs as raw audio to ensure the copy of I have on my harddrive is exactly the same as the CD. I'll start copying game cds to my hard drive to minimize that pesky cd-switching. So on and so forth - and you can damn well bet that (bloat/soft)ware writers will find ways to make their programs as large as possible in the same manner. It's the nature of the beast.
    • Well, i'd quite like to be able to backup about 15 of my DV tapes - they're 12Gb per 1hr tape. That's about 20% of your terabyte for not very many tapes. I'm sure that when video cameras start recording at better resolutions in coming years we'll have no problem filling up that Tb.

  • Ok, wait a minute... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @02:01AM (#3767491)
    Is there some kind of inside joke at Slashdot I'm not aware of? I've been reading /. for years, and no one told me about this. Probably two or three times a month, there's an article about a new processor that's going to run a million times faster than everything we have now, and will take up the space of a 'AA' battery without producing any heat, or, there's an article about a new data storage technique that's going to fit a trillion TBytes within an area the size of an Red Penguin cinnamons box, and will cost about as much as a can of diet coke.

    Will someone please let me in on the joke?

  • 1TB iPod (Score:5, Funny)

    by i1984 ( 530580 ) on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @02:03AM (#3767496)
    I can't wait for my 1 terabyte iPod!

    Lets see...a 10GB iPod costs $399 -- that's $39.90 per gigabyte. So extrapolating to 1000 gigabytes...yes...we'll have a $39,900 iPod!

    I'll take two of them; just let me find my checkbook. Oh shoot, I must have left it in the McLaren...I just hope it isn't in the Bentley. Well, I'll just have my chauffeur bring it 'round in the helicopter. Do you have a pen I could borrow?

    The real question is whether this technology will be better (and cheaper!) than any other high capacity memory when it's (maybe) released in 2008.

    I have my hopes pegged on static random access technology that doesn't depend on disk technology. Instant power on and no difference between storage and application memory are likely to be killer technologies.

    • Instant power on and no difference between storage and application memory are likely to be killer technologies.

      Especially if you manage to put your system in an unstable state, or an application manages to corrupt your memory... err, data.
      • Instant power on and no difference between storage and application memory are likely to be killer technologies.

        Especially if you manage to put your system in an unstable state, or an application manages to corrupt your memory... err, data.

         Or worse, the other way around: think "virus".

    • Actually the 10Gb iPod lists on http://www.apple.com [apple.com] as $499.00 and the 5Gb lists as $399.00. I therefore used a linear forecast to detremine that a 1Tb would list at $20,299 (a little cheaper). Still, a little out of my price range.
    • Forget about the cost of the player (which will always be around C$500). The proposed new tariffs [www.cpcc.ca] in MP3 players will add $21,000 to the cost!

      Fundamental mistake being made here by the CPCC: You can't base a fixed tariff on something that is as dynamic as Moore's law.

  • That's great, but... (Score:3, Funny)

    by chasec ( 157393 ) on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @02:04AM (#3767498) Homepage
    ...how many Libraries of Congress is it?
    • It's about 1 LoC, as the number I most commonly see associated with the Library of Congress (in text) is 2^40 bytes - or 1 terabyte.

      I'll only be impressed, however, when they develop a 1 petabyte drive, which is probably more text than has been produced in the entire history of man (in all languages). A drive that size would also hold 19 months of broadcast quality, full screen, raw video, as opposed to the paltry 14 hours provided by a 1 terabyte drive.

  • Posted previously. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Wohali ( 57372 ) on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @02:04AM (#3767504) Homepage
    Double-check what you've posted already [slashdot.org], guys, please...

    • You article and thread for which you give a link is referring to the "Millipede" method which is a mechanical method of data storage.

      The article this thread is about is a refinement of the magnetic method of data storage.

  • Floating Problems? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by stuffman64 ( 208233 )
    The first thing that crosses my mind when I see the illustration on the page, is how the heck are they going to be able to keep the head floating just right over the media. Today's drives are nearly perfectly flat to keep an even boundry of air to fly the head. With the pillars dipicted in the illustration, the drive will drag air and create turbulence. Even if the valleys are somehow "filled" in with another material (probably with some sort of plasma vapor depostion process), it is quite possible that the surfaces will not match up quite right. And the filler cannot mess up the magnetic properties of the material, or else this process is nearly pointless.

    Unless of course, they just sprinkle some Pixie Dust [ibm.com] on it and magically make it work.
    • Maybe it will run in a vacuum; of course, keeping a constant head-to-disk spacing will get harder, but not impossible (e.g., using mechanical spacers and fine tuning via piezo actuators). The media might also simply become non-rotational.
    • I imagine what will alleviate this problem is that to have the same access time the head will travel considerably less distance, and so have a smaller velocity, creating less drag and turbulence. IANA computer engineer, however...
    • Read the small print. The islands are only 5 nanometers high (and about ten times that wide). The head should sail right over it, a lofty 20 or 30 nm above the surface and still only "look down on" one island at a time.

      A much harder problem will be head tracking. With uniform media, you just need the head to return reliably to the same place when you tell it to. Now you have to actually get the head over a pre-existing feature on the disk, which is much harder.

  • Reliability? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Sheetrock ( 152993 )
    As mentioned elsewhere in here, as we pack greater densities into the medium the effect of heat on the data is easier to notice.

    However, another concern I have is with magnetics. Larger capacities mean that more magnetic signals are being clustered into smaller spaces, which would seem to make them more prone to distortion by magnetic forces external (the Earth, electric outlets, sunspots) and internal (SDRAM, the laptop monitor, and nearby signals on the drive itself). It's all well and good that the signals can be packed into the drive, but simultaneous advances in read/write head technology and nanoferris combinatorics in the drive wheel need to occur before we can start realizing data densities of the type we'd seriously drool over.

    Although, to tell you the truth, I never thought we'd reach a gigabyte in a desktop system either. However, the economic incentives just don't seem to be a driving force in any PC technology development lately, so I'm guessing it will be a while before we can pick this up at Best Buy.

    • However, the economic incentives just don't seem to be a driving force in any PC technology development lately, so I'm guessing it will be a while before we can pick this up at Best Buy.

      I agree. I don't see the average consumer needing this much disk space, any time soon. In fact, the largest hard drive PriceWatch mentions right now is only 181.6 GB, and it's SCSI -- not even a consumer drive.

      Before we begin increasing hard drive sizes, we need a reason. Servers always tend to need more space, but if we're talking about buying these drives off the shelves at Best Buy, we need a good reason to put them there, in the first place.

      Average consumers need enough space to fit their operating system, some office applications, a few documents, and a game or two or three. Say, 10 gigs, maximum. Yet, computer manufacturers are suckering them all into buying 40G or 60G drives. Maybe it's because of higher demand for MP3/DivX storage or something; I'm not sure.

      Either way, there's absolutely no reason your typical consumer is going to need a terabyte of storage in a tiny space.

      I see it like this. Hard drive sizes are proportional to the space needed to store data, obviously. Let's say MP3s are 5M per song. Let's then say DivXes are 700M per video. Then, we can assume the next media format, maybe holographic imaging or something, will be about 10G per file, if we extrapolate the current trend. ONLY THEN, will consumers need a freaking terabyte on a drive the size of a laptop's.

      Am I ranting, yet? Good night. :P
    • Consider that back in the days of the 386, people might have said the same of our current 120GB HDDs... Trust that if there are such issues, there will eventually be solutions.

      Where there is a will, there *is* a way.

      (I admit that arguably, such comments about 120gb drives may be correct... -_-)
  • If they hurry, I'll actually be able to run Final Fantasy XI!
  • OK, so it's able to store more on the same area... So does this automatically make it good? What about in terms of price, how much do we pay per MB on this new media? Durability? How will these plates be read, is it faster than the current method? Even if this is so, will it reduce or increase heat produced as compared to IDE or SCSI drives?

    Anyone has any test results on this proof-of-concept test done by IBM? And I thought they were selling off their hard drive business.
    • First, I doubt flying height will be a problem. This is nanoscale and the feature height is likely to be less than any sane flying height.

      Second, provided a small enough sensor can be made, there is no reason why signal integrity should be a problem. What matters is the local strength of the magnetic field, compared to ambient. If the domains are isolated, inter-domain interference is reduced, and the signal should be, in effect, sharper.

      Which leaves rotation as the problem. Perhaps they could try running a grid of minute wires through the substrate, and use currents in the wires to polarise or read the polarisation of the individual domains

      Oh, wait a minute...core

  • I though IBM was getting out of the Hard Drive market?

    Punchcards and now this. Funny!

    IBM... It Beats Me, I Bought Macntosh or even I Brought Money.

  • A terabyte? (Score:2, Funny)

    by detritus. ( 46421 )
    Wow! Think of how much Warez I could get off the Apple demo systems at Circuit City!
    • how much Warez I could get off the Apple demo systems at Circuit City!

      MS Office for Mac, AND the entire works of Kevin Costner in DivX.
      .
      .
      .
      .
      Maybe.
  • More and more articles seem to be appearing about nanotechnology from the medical science to that of a harddrive to CPUs. It will be interesting to see how many various ways nanotechnology will go, and more interesting to see if it is actually cost affordable.

    Now as far as a terebyte of harddrive space, just how long would that take to format, and if I used any current type (NTFS, FAT, etc) how much of that space would I actually lose? It's great they think they can make this, but wouldn't it be nice if we could actually use the entire amount of space that we current have? I have a 40gb formated as NTFS and I lost about 2.63GB of space. Now of course 2.63GB is nothing when you still have 30gb spare, but its hardly the point.

    Thank You.

  • Awesome. (Score:2, Funny)

    by sawilson ( 317999 )
    If this coincides with the latest microsoft windows release, there should be at least enough space left for britneyinvegas.jpg.

  • My one question: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Sean Johnson ( 66456 )
    Here is an interesting question: How much computer data storage would be required to hold every single type of media created by humans in their whole history of being. I am talking about every single movie, every song, every written work, all the books, all the newspapers & magazines. All the folklore and tales. All the mathematical and scinetific journals. All the philosophical and poetic works.....everything!
    Keeping in mind that it would be compressed to afford maximum storage with minimal loss of quality using all forms of compression available today. It boggles my mind to think of all the works that we humans have produced. All that information.
    • I think I read somewhere that some guy predicted it would take 8 exabytes. I really don't remember how many gigs or terabytes that is.
    • The biggest in size will be video.

      Uncompressed video is rated in sizes of FUCKING HUGE. This terabyte drive wouldn't even hold all that much.

      For compression it depends on what you define as minimal loss of quality. Lossless compression still comes out to be pretty damn big (which is less than fucking huge).

      Even with crappy looking divx it still adds up and you would have a hard time getting ALL TV, movies, and whatever other video media that humanity has produced to fit in anything.

      It also depends on resolution. NTSC, PAL, etc, and of course all digital video and picture formats have set resolutions but both video and still film and all physical artwork (which I count as media) don't have pixels, so you have to decide what resolution to scan them in at.

      Tim
    • all you need to do is become one of their customers.

  • Further Reading (Score:2, Informative)

    by Overcoat ( 522810 )
    An slightly longer article on patterned media was published in Technology Research News back in February 2001. The article goes into more detail about how the technology works and about some of the problems associated with development of it. Linkeroo [trnmag.com]
  • I'm amazed no one has mentioned Texas yet... it always comes up when size is the issue.

    ...can we fit Texas in one of these hard disks?

  • ...since you'll probably wait a couple of hours for the thing to finish formatting. And imagine backing that sucker up--I know that many don't have backups of our primary drive. Better get a large-capacity medium to do that.

  • In related news... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This new technique could produce 150 gigabits per square centimeter-- that's ~57,000 songs on an iPod or a terabyte on a laptop size hard drive!"

    In related news, the RIAA was said to be pushing Congress to make sale of portable MP3 players with >1Tb capacity illegal, citing the widespread increase of piracy which would follow as evidence the devices couldn't possibly be used legally.

    RIAA representatives pointed out at a press conference late this afternoon that an iPod capable of storing 57,000 songs would mean the purchase of 4750 CD's (Averaging 12 tracks/disc), coming out to a total of over $85,000 (At $18/disc). Clearly, representatives stated, no consumer would spend $85,000 on CD's, so the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that anyone interested in a portable MP3 player with >1Tb of capacity intend to pirate their music.
    • I found myself smiling at this post, and then I noticed the score +2: Insightful.

      I thought it was just a joke. Was it? Don't know if I should laugh or cry at RIAA's foolishness if it's true...

  • RAED (Score:3, Funny)

    by DarkHelmet ( 120004 ) <{ten.elcychtneves} {ta} {kram}> on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @03:04AM (#3767648) Homepage
    So, considering how expensive this is, shouldn't putting these puppies in parallel be instead RAED? (Redundant Array of Expensive Drives)?

    In all honesty, it sounds like one of those leet haxor people talking.

    I g0t me a l33t 1tb RAED dr1ve. I 0wn j00!

  • Circular? (Score:3, Informative)

    by NeuroManson ( 214835 ) on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @03:07AM (#3767653) Homepage
    I hope they aren't thinking of using the design that the example shows, it's an awfully inefficient use of space... Would be more effective to either make the particles pyramidic, that way you could have an even smaller point for magnetic fields and since it tapers at the tip, less chance for "crosstalk" from one particle to the next... Since we're talking something on a molecular scale, there would probably be less in the way of drag or heat buildup, whereas the cylindrical design is just begging for it...

    • Re:Circular? (Score:4, Informative)

      by clark625 ( 308380 ) <<clark625> <at> <yahoo.com>> on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @07:15AM (#3768139) Homepage

      You would think that a pyramid would be a neat advance, but it's probably not feasable. The costs associated currently are too high for consideration.

      The problem with pyramids is the formation. Hard drive manufacturers like to use Si, polymers, metals, and the like. Doing a photolithography step on them isn't difficult--but finding an etchant that will prefer to etch in a pyramidal shape is rather tough. If you can find one, it usually will etch down such that you end up with pyramids facing into the substrate.

      Not that it can't be done. I recall some work done creating pyramids on GaAs substrates. It may be extendable to other material systems as well. But GaAs is a zincblend crystal structure--not a diamond structure like Si is. The zincblend readily makes itself agreeable to off-axis etching (especially if you get the proper offcut wafer).

      Maybe if the polymer could be self-assembling and would itself produce the desired pyramidal shapes, then everyone would be happy. Doing a metalization step over top of that would not be difficult at all. But I'm not terribly great at dealing with polymers--I don't know where the limits of self-assembly are. I'm sure someone else does, though--and I know of several journal papers you might consider.
      Anyways--your idea is good, but it's an ideal. At this moment, there doesn't really exist a practical way to make metalized pyramids without steps that would either be prohibitively expensive (I'm talking processing time here), or steps that would require too large of feature size.

      • What about using molecular assembly methods rather than lithography to begin with? Sure, it's expensive, but you can make it in bulk, and really, are we going to expect TB HD technology to be cheap in the short term... Oh, as an alternative, you could make the individual particles separately from the disc strata, with one compund at the base favoring an ionic attraction to the disc... When "dipped", the particles would bond electrostatically to the disc, after which a quick heat bonding could be used to permanently fix said particles to the disc, much like how toner bonds to an imaging drum and subsequently the paper that rolls across it... Just a thought...

        • Molecular self-assembly isn't terribly expensive in terms of money (well, indirectly--but I'll get to that). The R&D required can be huge in terms of time and money. Companies prefer to apply techniques already developed and that are proven. Also, self-assembly is extremely expensive in terms of processing time and technician's expertise. You can't do them in batch steps in my experience--instead it's one at a time and there's lots of inspecting to ensure things turn out as desired. Didn't work? Throw it out and start over (or try and recover what you can if possible). So much for a high yield.

          Irregardless, another huge problem will be adding particles (or molecules) to a substrate in a particular orientation. If I pattern the substrate, I will know exactly where every single bit will be relative to the others. I can write my HD controller with this in mind (including timing between bit reads and writes, etc). If I throw a bunch of particles on top, I can't be sure of their spacing. I might also get regions with different densities than others (even good printers suffer from this). I seriously doubt that this could be made such that these problems can be alleviated.

          Neither of these problems can be easily dealt with. Not that they won't ever be overcome, though. Maybe you'll be the first one to prove me wrong :)

          • Well, call this a silly thought, but what if a comb was made out of nanofibers, kind of like a microscopic rake? That could be used to align the pyramids properly...

            These are all hypothetical questions, however...
  • Does this mean the Library of Congress will instantly shrink to the size of a matchbox? Or is it that my laptop will turn into 5 libraries?
  • How much capacity is required for a song?

    • 2Mb? -> 111Gb
    • 2.5Mb? -> 139Gb
    • 3Mb? -> 167Gb
    • 3.5Mb? -> 195Gb
    • 4Mb? -> 223Gb
    Is there some standard sized song that I don't know about?

    Andrew

  • ...57,000 songs... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Burning1 ( 204959 ) on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @03:41AM (#3767721) Homepage
    "...57,000 songs on an iPod or a terabyte on a laptop size hard drive!"

    ...or about 28% of my porno collection. : )


    • "...57,000 songs on an iPod or a terabyte on a laptop size hard drive!"

      ...or about 28% of my porno collection. : )


      Good thing you mention... It is just way beyond me why anyone and their dog use the "xxx songs" phrase to measure storage volume... hell, I listen to psytrance tracks which usually play 10mins or more... and I try to stick to 192kbit or VBR mp3 files. So, how many songs can I store now? What if I want to store 3sec uncompressed PCM/WAV jingles?

      >>>fastforward 3 years>>>
      Salesdrone: "...with this hatchback model you get an amazing boost of storage volume! It totals about 240pounds of marijuana or 11.5 standard M-16 transport crates..."

      hmmmm...
      • Kind of reminds me of my brother, a while back... He used to be heavily into replica Katanas, and had set his eye on a particular model that cost about $300... From then on, he'd measure the value of anything else in 'swords.'

        The result was comments such as: Currently I'm in the market for a used car in the range of 8-10 swords.

        I admit that he did discover a good way to fuck with car salesmen. ^_^

        Regarding music... I agree... Diamond sold me a MP3 advertising 90 minutes of 'CD Quality' music, and a few hours of recorded talking; both useless figures.

        Slashdot really has entered a marketing mindset, hasn't it?

  • If an electromagnetic solar flare hit earth, not only would it knock out all electrical devices /powerstations etc but it would wipe every magnetic storage device on the planet, can you imagine what you/yourBusiness would do if you lost a terrabyte of code/pr0n/games ! , i mean sure everyone would be in the same position (except those that backed up on cd/dvd) , but i would hate to think what impact worldwide that would have on individuals/business/society

    arent we relying on magnetic data storage too much ? packing ever more magnetic data into smaller (easier damaged) spaces , surely optical storage of some description (holographic etc) would be more reliable longterm, be a shame to lose the last 30 years of computing/business (let alone 200 if we continue to use magnetic media) because we focused on storing it on such an easily damaged fragile medium.

    there has to be a better way

  • Security implications? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CProgrammer98 ( 240351 ) on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @04:51AM (#3767853) Homepage
    The article states that the new technology will only use one magnetic grain per bit as opposed to the hundreds currently used.

    I wonder if this means that once a cluster is overwritten, there is no ghosting effect that could allow the previous data to be retrieved. Once the data's gone, it's gone. A single magnetic grain can only be set one way!

    So NSA or whoever won't be able to retrieve those docs you wiped just before they busted into your home/office....

    In the light of this, this tech. it is probably not in the security industry's best interest!

    So as well as getting space for all your music and porn, you don't have to worry about the data persisting on your drive when you want to remove it... all in all a good thing!
    • Right, but how long would that wipe take?

      Completely wiping my disks at work (writing psuedo-random data to disk three times followed by writing all 0's) takes over two hours on my 40GB ATA100 drive.

      On a 1TB disk the wipe wouldn't get very far during a FBI raid before the plug was pulled.

      A better solution to quick wipe a disk that size would be to use a very high power electro-magnet.

      And that brings up another point, how long does it take to access data on any given part of the disk? Unless there is some huge advance in access speed 1TB on a disk isn't terribly useful.
  • Yeah, whatever.

    It's not as though there isn't technology available yet to store all the data you could ever want stored quickly cheaply. Whatever became of holographic and fluorescent read/write CD technology?

    They had working models of those machines, for crying out loud! They had manufacturers lined up to produce the various chemicals and parts to make it a go. I was reading emails from a fellow who was running a demo of a desk-top version nearly five years ago.

    And let's face it; even the top of the line computer which even makes a brief ice-berg appearance in the standard news forums is ancient technology by any number of arbitrary standards.

    Or NOT arbitrary, I mean.

    --We're a bunch of consumer monkeys bouncing around waiting for the next big thing, but we'll only get it when the powers that be decide we're good and ready. --Wouldn't want people to have computers which didn't waste a billion otherwise useful hours per year. Oh no! Computers which don't suck up attention by the gallon might allow people to use their time NOT being distracted by all the insane shit going down around their ears these days! Between television, computers and game boxes, people are pretty much doped up right-smart-good! Opiate of the masses, indeed. Bah.

    Terabyte this.


    -Fantastic Lad

  • working with 1Tb (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sarin ( 112173 ) on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @05:20AM (#3767910) Homepage Journal
    I've made myself a terabyte fileserver a while ago, everything's raid-5 so there's redundant data incase one of the 160gb drives crashes. I wouldn't want to use a single gb drive, imagine yourself collecting a lot of data and then that single drive crashes, all of that work would be for nothing. I got firewire installed on it so the speed is really fast for other computers.
    Another thing is you have to be very tidy with your archive, otherwise such a big drive is going to be very messy.
  • A Terabyte of Data on a Laptop Hard Drive

    from the pleasant-daydream dept.

    ....that's ~57,000 songs on an iPod


    You obviously don't work for the RIAA, do you?

  • When, exactly? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by PMuse ( 320639 )
    57,000 songs * 3 minutes / song * 1 hour / 60 minutes * 1 day / 24 hours = 118+ days of continuous 24-hour music

    (a) When, exactly, are you going to listen to all this? Not to mention collect it?

    (b) Don't you think the critical part of the system might be something other than storage space? Like, say, the battery?
  • I could easily consume 1.2 TB in a consumer device, but that would only hold the 200 DVDs I currently own. I think I'd need at least 2.5 to 3 TB to make it worth while and to include my CDs and a little future storage space. Of course, with HD now "live," I see a need for a HD server in the next 4 to 7 years which could easily surpass 4 to 5 TB in size.

    I have no fear about "too much" storage. It's a shame these devices are mechanical, though, as the reliability and complexity tends to place a large fixed price (esp in a consumer device) before the first bit can be placed.

  • The higher you climb, the further you fall. But in this case, the more you store, the more you will lose.

    Every time hard drive storage gets denser, we further space ourselves away from effective means to make archival backups of this huge amount of data we are carrying around. While your MP3 collection might be expendable, a week's worth of digital photos might not be. Or any other data you can imagine.

    When is a cost-effective 1 TB DLT drive going to come to market?
  • Two terabytes gives you a thousand hours of video, ten thousand hours of audio. It becomes hard to find and use that many hours, even with the best indexing schemes.

  • At today's sizes, a laptop hard drive with that density could hold over a terabyte of data...

    ...clearing the path for future versions of Windows.

  • I thought that IBM had gotten out of the hard drive business? Are they going to build a new startup?

    I suppose that there could be a bit of latency in the time-to-print cycle, and that might explain it. (Or perhaps it was General Electric that they sold their business to?)

  • Protecting it? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Methedup ( 588440 )
    With such extremely compact data, the thing I would most worry about is a scratch, such as bumping you TB-laptop while accessing: Instantly you have a couple GB of bad sectors! Oh, the pain. Just pray that it hits a clean spot...

  • Removable storage, anyone ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by billcopc ( 196330 ) <vrillco@yahoo.com> on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @04:59PM (#3773232) Homepage
    I guess this means my shiny new DVD burner is already obsolete. Backing up my desktop to 4.7gb DVD-RW discs was decent, but now if I end up with a TB or two on my raid array, I'll have to find another backup system. And no, tapes don't cut it, nor does carrying an extra pair of hard drives around. Where's that 155tb optical disc we've been hearing about for the last ten years ?

  • I DO need a Terrabyte. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jiminy ( 588565 )
    For those of you who are saying that a terrabyte is a rediculous amount of data storage: Forget not that a 10MB hard disk was once considered massive. Today, you couldn't hope to put most programs into that amount of space! Not to mention those of us who have a tendency to hoarde mp3's and DivX's (myself included). Hell, my current project is a machine that spec's an even terrabyte of disk space! It would be very convenient IMHO if i could simply drop in one hard drive and have it done. (As opposed to spending hours configuring 10 100GB drives in some type of RAID)

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