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Technology Hardware

Data Transfer Has A Speed Limit 355

Posted by simoniker from the quite-a-high-one dept.
ChrisHanel writes "Yahoo News is reporting that despite the infinite climb data speeds seem to be making, scientists at Stanford say we'll eventually hit a barrier due to the inability to keep the data stable after a certain transfer speed. But no worries just yet; the watermark they've set is still 1,000 times faster than what we have now." Apparently: "The scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic material used to store computer data."
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Data Transfer Has A Speed Limit More

Data Transfer Has A Speed Limit

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  • Limit only applies to Magnetic Storage (Score:5, Informative)

    by Novanix ( 656269 ) * on Thursday April 22, 2004 @02:41AM (#8936559) Homepage
    While it does say that using the current magnetized bit storage system has a speed limit that is 1000 times the current, it is only with this method of storage. Hopefully by the time we could hit this limit we will have a new method of storage. Besides, if my data could be written at 1000x the max of current maybe I won't need memory any more (or maybe our storage will be memory). Anyone have any ideas what we will be storing at that speed? (other than everything happening around us and everyone else so we have instant replay on life).

  • I am still confident... (Score:4, Funny)

    by odano ( 735445 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @02:44AM (#8936568)
    I am still confident that a 747 full of DVDs will beat anything we have in the next few years. Sadly the latency is a bit too high for quake.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @02:45AM (#8936572)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Fun! (Score:5, Funny)

    by insert 3 letters ( 768692 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @02:45AM (#8936575)
    "The scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic material used to store computer data." I wish I had a particle accelerator just lying around, that'd be sweet.

    • Re:Fun! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Teclis ( 772299 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @03:32AM (#8936754) Homepage
      You probually do have a particle accelerator lying around. Your CRT accelerates electrons onto the screen. If you consider X-rays and microwaves as particles, you probually heat your food with one. Your TV produces X-rays. If you have an old smoke detector, you can probually make a quick and dirty Alpha-gun. (Americium decays ejecting alpha particles).

      Although, if you want a High-Power accelerator, that's a different matter and it would be very interesting to do it. Hmm... Use your own power generator? I doubt the power company will be able to supply you TeV's through your power outlet, but then you would need your own Nuclear reactor to do that.

      If you can make even a GeV accelerator, that would be impressive. If anyone's heard of such a back-yard project, let me know.

      • Re:Fun! (Score:2, Informative)

        by __aagctu1952 ( 768423 )
        If you consider
        X-rays and microwaves as particles, you probually heat your food with one.

        Jesus! And I thought my microwave oven was high-powered!

        "Introducing the new Roentgen Roaster 3000 - gives a whole new meaning to nuking your food"
    • And what would you do with a particle accelerator?

  • If there's one thing I've learnt... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ratface ( 21117 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @02:46AM (#8936578) Homepage Journal
    especially from reading The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing newsletter (now known as - The Harrow Report [theharrowgroup.com], it's that whatever barriers to computer speed increases are set up by theoreticists are quickly knocked down by other theoreticists who find ways around them.'

    Of course, this doesn't mean that finding the barriers is a bad thing - it gives the next set of scientists something to aim for and pushes the boundaries of research.

  • Pratice allready has another way out...... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MrIrwin ( 761231 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @02:46AM (#8936579) Journal
    By splitting data into paralell data streams.

    RAID arrays, SMP, GPRS, Data MUX's that use paralell fibre channels are all examples.

  • but feeding the stream being sent. I guess if I wrote a program to transmit 010101... and my processor could keep up, then there isnt really a limit..

    • Re:Not transfer in the internet sense, (Score:5, Informative)

      by geoff313 ( 718010 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @03:00AM (#8936647) Journal
      Actually, no

      The problem comes from the transfer itself due to the limits of magnetic storage. While this isn't mentioned in the summary, if you were to RTFA then you would see that the problem arrives when you fire electrons at a magnetic storage material fast enough (approaching the speed of light) they stop behaving in the expected way, and start producing random results. This of course is unacceptable for a storage medium, because if you increase the increase the pulses to write to the disk to near the speed of light it will result in random bits being flipped here and there and corrupt your data.

      -geoff313


      • Yes.

        If the data comes from/goes to a HD, if you take the HD out of the equation the limit goes away (for a while, perhaps). /dev/random to /dev/null isnt all that limited by HD speed. Or you can replace magnetic storage w/ something else.

  • Future markets (Score:5, Funny)

    by Old Wolf ( 56093 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @02:48AM (#8936587)

    However, Seagate's chief technology officer, Mark Kryder, said the project had few real implications for the data-storage industry.

    "Certainly we are not going to start packaging linear accelerators into hard disk drives,

    Fools, cutting themself out of the linear accelerator harddrive market already. I'm switching to WD..

  • Name one thing that doesn't hit a barrier ?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ThomasFlip ( 669988 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @02:50AM (#8936594)
    Every advancement in technology has to hit a limit at some point. I don't see how this could be any bit of a suprise if thats what the article is trying to insinuate. Speed of light, eventual size of microprocessors, width of fibres, strength of metals etc... There is no infinitely 'advanceable' technology which should be obvious. Technology has come a long way in the past 100 years as well, the limits we discover will only continue to be found quickly.
  • the transit rate of the average human digestive system has a maximum speed too, but you don't need to feed someone a cayenne and wasabi-laden, amoebic dysentery-infested mexican dinner plate in order to prove it ;-P

    but, i suppose, you don't need to throw elemental sodium into a swimming pool to do basic chemistry either

    so rock on particle physicists!

    it must be fun to play with accelerators...

  • "Data Transfer Has A Speed Limit" (Score:5, Funny)

    by r_glen ( 679664 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @02:51AM (#8936601)
    c
    • I think that may be the shortest post to get mod points...
    • Data transfer via quantum entanglement can go faster.
      • You'll never go back to that after you've experienced data transfer via bad news.

      • Re:No. (Score:3, Informative)

        by maxwell demon ( 590494 )
        It cannot. On the receiver side, you get one of four states at random. Those four states are such that every measurement you do on your result will have a random outcome from which you cannot conclude what was sent. Only with the information measured on the sender side and then transmitted through classical communication (and therefore, at maximum with the speed of light), you can decode the function.

        You can think of it as if during teleportation, the data sent is encrypted with an automatically chosen ran

        • Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Kynde ( 324134 )
          It cannot. On the receiver side, you get one of four states at random. Those four states are such that every measurement you do on your result will have a random outcome from which you cannot conclude what was sent. Only with the information measured on the sender side and then transmitted through classical communication (and therefore, at maximum with the speed of light), you can decode the function.

          You can think of it as if during teleportation, the data sent is encrypted with an automatically chosen ran

  • I'll be the first (Score:3, Funny)

    by eclectro ( 227083 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @02:51AM (#8936603)

    Magnetic tape: $1.75

    Linear Particle Accelerator at a major university: $2,300,000,000

    Picosecond access to your pr0n: Priceless.

    For everything else, there's Mastercard.
    • Ah yes but Mastercard has a magnetic stripe on the back so there is a limit to how fast you can swipe it through the reader.

      Perhaps the banks had anticipated the increase in consumer credit card usage and the magnetic bandwidth limit when they designed the system, hence the decision to put 4 paralell tracks.

  • to sum it up... (Score:3, Informative)

    by updog ( 608318 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @02:52AM (#8936606) Homepage
    "It's not something that's going to impact anything we're contemplating in hard disk drives."

    Remember that this only applies to magnetic media, so future writable technology (polymers, optical, solid state, etc) wouldn't have this limitation.

  • ..we will all have a particle accelerator hooked up to eth0?
  • People once believed that if a train went too fast, that all the air would be pushed out of it.

    This proposition is just a modern equivalent of that idea.

    Perhaps electromagnetic pulses have a physical limitation with data transfer accuracy, but that is by no means the threshold of data speed in any way.

    Once again, RTFA. It speaks of EM data - not all data.

  • So what's the timescale here? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by syousef ( 465911 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @02:58AM (#8936633) Journal
    2^10 = 1024. So we have 10 doublings of the speed of data left to go right? How often do data speeds double? (Using these methods of course).

    I wonder sort of progress will be impacted in practical terms. There are limits to everything of course. Just one more limit. I hope I'm alive to run into some of these scientific limits so I can see what innovative workarounds people come up with.
    • For hard disks I think it's 18 months (vague memory, maybe completely wrong). This would mean we still have 15 years time to invent something better.
    • Limits are reached and worked around all the time. Old styles of making CPU's has reached its limit already and been passed by. As CPU's used to exist at the speeds of today they wouldn't work. The basic architecture of CPU's from years ago would not handle speeds of a few GHZ. Thats why we have new improvements to cpus that you dont even think about. L1/L2/L3 cacheing is one example. Cpu's could never work at 3ghz without any cache by the simple fact that the speed of electricity isn't fast enough to suppl
  • With some parallelism, the sky's the limit.

  • 640 Gbps (Score:5, Funny)

    by Seehund ( 86897 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @03:03AM (#8936660) Homepage Journal
    should be enough for everyone.

  • Serial Limit Only (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eponymous Cowboy ( 706996 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @03:04AM (#8936662)
    This kind of thing crops up now and again in lots of fields. It's basically the same problem that keeps being predicted with our Interstate Highway system. There's a safe limit as to the speed that we can have cars travelling, and if the highways fill up, bumper to bumper all moving at that speed, we've reached capacity.

    The most obvious solution there is the same as the obvious solution here: Add more lanes. If you have thirty-two lanes of traffic instead of one, you've increased your capacity roughly 32 times. Same situation here: Transmit 32 bits in parallel (simultaneously) down distinct channels, rather than in serial (one at a time).

    Just as building more lanes is expensive, here the expense comes in multiplying all of the necessary hardware to handle wider data busses for as far down the path as necessary to deal with more data in parallel. Right now, we've got parallel busses inside our PCs, but the bits often end up serialized at some point inside our processors, down at the microcode level. All of these bottlenecks need to be categorized and eliminated to overcome such a theoretical data transfer limit. It will be neither easy nor inexpensive, especially when we decide we need to send and process, say, 2048 bits in parallel in order to meet our data processing needs. At some point, it becomes more economical to separate things on a higher level (add more processors, or add more PCs), similar to building additional highways rather than just adding lanes.

    • Re:Serial Limit Only (Score:3, Interesting)

      by tooth ( 111958 )
      I've read (somewhere?) that it's eaiser to get serial going faster than parallel because with serial you don't have to line all the bits up to arrive at the same time like you do with parallel.

      This is why a lot of the new high speed buses are serial (USB, firewire etc.)

  • Wrong title (Score:2, Informative)

    by heli_flyer ( 614850 )
    This limit only applies to hard drive media, so the title should be "Hard drive media has a data transfer limit" not "data transfer has a limit".
  • Takes about two seconds to prove Stanford boffins wrong.

    RAID.

    Nuff sed.

  • Light traveling faster than light? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fromeo ( 256304 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @03:10AM (#8936682)
    (very slightly off topic... sorry.) I attended a physics colloquium the other week in which a professor from Duke was presenting the results of his research into the question of whether information could be sent faster than light through the various ways of coaxing wave speeds to be faster than c in anomalously dispersive media. If you concoct a medium in which the index of refraction decreases as the wavelength of light increases, the "group velocity", or the speed at which pulses propagate, can be made to be faster than c. The "phase velocity", or the velocity at which each frequency of light propagates, is still less than c, but the pulse that each frequency is a part of is going faster than light. The problem is that for the most part, the shape of a wave is pretty deterministic once you've seen a fairly small sample of the waveform. So recieving just the first few microseconds / nanoseconds / etc. of the pulse tells you everything about all of the frequencies which make it up. But he added a nondeterministic part to the signal he sent (through this anomalously dispersive media), changing the shape of the pulse midstream depending on whether he was sending a "1" or a "0". He then timed how long it took before his detector could tell whether the incoming pulse was a "1" or a "0", and determined that despite the media appearing to emit the pulse before it recieved the pulse, his detector still could not differentiate between a "1" and a "0" faster than the speed of light. So Einstein (and Maxwell) continues to be vindicated, and information cannot possibly travel faster than the speed of light.

  • QM Mechanical limit (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DrFalkyn ( 102068 )
    I believe that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would suggesti a upper bound for how fast data can be transmitted over a single channel using photons. Can any physicist give me a reason why teh following reasoning would not be correct?

    dx*dp = h/2*PI (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle)

    Which any one with a undertanding of physics would know implies that:

    dE*dt = h/2*PI

    E = hf would be the energy of a photon of frequency f. Therefore dE = h*df.

    h*df*dt = h/2*PI simplifies to dt = 1/2*PI*df.

    If we hav
    • If looking only at frequency and time, you don't even have to use quantum mechanics. The frequency/time limit is a fundamental result of fourier analysis and applies equally for classical waves.

      And in principle it's easy: If you want to get more bits per second, you must change your signal more often, which implies a higher frequency.
  • The scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator

    Damn! I wish I had a job where I could say "Let's fire up the particle accelerator"...

  • "You must require 48mbps of bandwidth to connect to this port."

    -Adam
  • Okay, here's what I think is wrong with this experiment to "determine" the limit. 1. They're firing one type of particle, an electron, at medium that is supposedly like today's media. A. Who's to say that media is what we'll be using in the future. B. Who's to say we'll ever collect data using fired electrons? That process is utterly different from the electromagnetic process used to read modern magnetic media. C. I see no indication that electrons fired at magnetic media represents an "edg-defining" e
  • They needed a faster way to get data to a printer than was available using current technology, so they created the parallel port. Data is sent via multiple pathways. So in the case of disks, you stripe them to combine bandwidth. Since most drives have multiple platters you just stripe across them internally. Or use a special head that writes to a single platter in multiple places at once.

  • Flying Gigs (Score:3, Funny)

    by Nevrar ( 65761 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @03:33AM (#8936757)
    Hmm...

    Well, they always said, "Gigs will never fly".
  • We'll find a way around that too. We're humans! We find a way around everything!

  • Sledgehammer vs Nut (Score:3, Funny)

    by tonywestonuk ( 261622 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @03:48AM (#8936798)
    "the scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic material used to store computer data....
    ...The researchers noticed that the magnetic patterns left behind were somewhat chaotic    "

    Well, there's a surprise for ya..... Would never have guessed that.... not in a million years, no, never. :)
  • Even at a 1,000 times faster than current capabilities, you'd never be able to catch up. By the time you reached 1,000 times faster, you'd still be behind. There's no end. Companies aren't just going to send out the very very best. They're going to get as much money as they can until the best is obsolete and then they'll release the next biggest thing. This gives their R&D time to come up with something better.
    • One other thing I forget to mention. Even if a company's R&D fails at coming up with something faster, their marketting department can do the job. Remember, the majority of the market is made up of the less tech savvy people. USB 2 is marketted as being capable of 480 Mb/s. For the average joe this seems fast. But to the tech savvy person, it's just 60 MB/s.
  • Hard drives today are like the good old magnetic tapes of yesterday. Huge storage, slow access. Access times are still in the milliseconds range, and transfer rates... Heck, transfer rates are ridiculously small compared to the huge capacities we are getting. Who cares about magnetization speed limit with those pending issues...

  • Not if we breed more pigeons! (Score:5, Funny)

    by suso ( 153703 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @08:12AM (#8937614) Journal
    Infinite pigeons with infinite discs yields infinite data speed.

  • "Scientific Study" A Play in one part (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tarwn ( 458323 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @08:26AM (#8937660) Homepage
    [scene - A man standing in a white coat in front of a panel of blinking lights with a large red button. Panel attached to wall with a small viewing glass]

    [Joe - frantically mashing the big button and peering through the window, laughing in a slightly mad fashion]

    [Enter Bob, stage right - also dressed in a white coat]

    Bob: [steady, staid tones] Joe, what are you doing?

    Joe: [excited] It kept saying "Bad Disk Sector", "Bad Disk Sector", "Bad Disk Sector", so I so I threw it against the wall, then I stepped on it, then, then, then it was still in one piece so....

    Bob: [still steady]: Joe, you do realize that every time you push that button it sends another electron shooting down the particle accelarator...

    Joe: [laughing unsteadily and still frantically pushing button]

    Bob: And each time the particle accelerator fires it uses one tenth of our available power....

    Joe: [unceasing in his manic button pressing]

    Bob: Are you sure we have the reserves for this?

    [cue blinking light above station]
    [cue overhead voice]
    Voice: Reserve Depleted, Switching to External Power Source

    Joe: [giggling] ooOooh I think I got it good that time

    [cue crackling electronics]

    [Cue joe stops, steps back confused]

    [Cue lights down, single muffled spot on scientists]

    Joe: Umm...Bob, What Happened?

    Bob: I believe that was the North-East US blacking out...I'm not sure they'll be happy when we tell them you were using the particle accelerator to get even with your floppy disk

    Joe: Well, well, well, we'll just tell them we were doing a study, yeah, a study on, um, maximum data transfer rates, yeah, and, um, it took longer then we thought?

    [cue final lights down] :)

  • That's not the scary part (Score:5, Funny)

    by nomadicGeek ( 453231 ) * on Thursday April 22, 2004 @08:59AM (#8937839)
    The scary thing is that someone will figure out how to fit that particle accelerator into a hard disk enclosure before we figure out how to make the battery on my laptop last a full workday without a recharge.

  • Wait... (Score:3, Funny)

    by sv25 ( 773540 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @10:37AM (#8938721)
    ... so the dream of surfing for porn at an infinite speed is over *sob*

  • Magnetic Storage (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nyspy ( 773130 ) on Thursday April 22, 2004 @12:53PM (#8940293)
    These problems won't be prevalent with holographic storage mediums. When they get it right.

  • WRONG WRONG WRONG (Score:3, Informative)

    by DynaSoar ( 714234 ) * on Thursday April 22, 2004 @04:02PM (#8942783) Journal
    It is NOT about data transfer, or even data storage. It is about magnetic writing. Did the submitter RTFA or just the also-incorrect title?

    As far as storage, 10 years ago they could store a gigabyte in a 3D crystal the size of a sugar cube and read the whole thing back in a second. {HOLOGRAPHIC MEMORIES , By: Psaltis, Demetri, Mok, Fai, Scientific American, 00368733, Nov95, Vol. 273, Issue 5}. That was before the many advances in optical storage technology, particularly high frequency lasers. And using only ONE laser focus, which even DVDs already surpass.

    As for transfer rate, look to astrophysics. Radio astronomers listen to signals using amplifiers that carry a billion channels at once. That's a hell of a parallel system. Turn it around and broadcast through it using plain old 8N1+stop protocol in parallel and you're moving 100 MB PER PULSE. Multiply that times your chosen broadcast primary frequency, say 1 GHz, and you're moving 100 petabytes per second, give or take the shift to the lowest frequency on the MUXing.

    It's usually at this point that the engineers start sputtering about how impossible it is due to Fourier transform limitations, proving they're not aware that radio astronomers were listening to thousands of channels even before they had time/freqency analysis via continuous wavelet transform running in real time.

  • We've heard this before... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 22, 2004 @07:03PM (#8944767)
    We've heard this sort of thing before back in the BBS days. No one thought we could get more than 9600 baud with a modem over the existing POTs. Now we not only have "56k" modems but DSL technology up to 8Mpbs over short runs (available now) with much higher speeds on the way. Someone always comes up with a probably/theoretical limit on bandwidth, processing power, etc, etc and someone else always comes along and finds a clever new way to break that limit. It's a long way off before we hit the limit they are talking about with our current technology. Who knows what we'll have by then. I mark this article as plus one interesting but minus several points for not being important from a realistic and practical standpoint.

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