Sounds impossible? It could really happen, thanks to a new breakthrough.
Can you even imagine an MP3 player with a 500,000 GB capacity? It’s pretty much beyond belief. The most generous player today can only hold around 40,000 songs – they’d hardly makea dent on this. The thing is, it could easily happen. Scientists at the University of Glasgow have created a nanotechnology breakthrough that could increasestorage capacity by 150,000 times. It could mean 500,000 GB on a single chip and inch square. The Glasgow scientists worked to create the molecule-sized switch that’s at the heart of it all.Professor Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow said, “What we have done is find a way to potentially increase the data storage capabilities in a radical way. We have been able to assemble afunctional nanocluster that incorporates two electron donating groups, and position them precisely 0.32 nm apart so that they can form a totally new type of molecular switching device. The keyadvantage of the molecule sized switch is information / transistor density in traditional semi-conductors. Molecule sized switches would lead to increasing data storage to say 4 Petabits persquare inch. This breakthrough shows conceptually that this is possible (showing the bulk effect) but we are yet to solve the fabrication and addressing problems. The fact these switches work oncarbon means that they could be embedded in plastic chips so silicon is not needed and the system becomes much more flexible both physically and technologically.” The discovery was firstreported in Nature Nanotechnology.
Showing 45 comments
RSSAs far as I'm concerned, computers and other electronic devices are bottlenecked as they are now.
1: A big holdback in industry is the "idea" that we never have enough space. We get people working on deleting and/or archiving to cd financial and text records. Man hours are still being put into worry over "disk space". Meanwhile, my work email is limited to 100MB; I'm rolling through that many times a year. Disk space has been irrelevant in terms of text and data for years. This experimental technology just sinks it 5'11" deeper.
2: One of these chips at 500 tb will not be enough for a trip to the holodeck (a la Startrek). Movies could be on their way to holoprojected 3d environments combined with tastes and smells or whatever. Could it be on a "pocket device" like an MP3 player, sure, but it will be hooked to my jacked up IMAX quality eyeglasses and my Sensall 1200(tm) full immersion body suit, or wirelessly transmitted to a jack in somebody's brain (not mine thanks.)
I say bring on the storage and lets get creating and experiencing.
Ed
Take care !
I dont think I even have enough Videos to fill something like that! I only have about 12G of music.
What are you going to store on it? The human genome plus a few other things... like the whole internet, haha.
Let's forget about the mp3-bit, they only put it there so people could understand how much space it actually is, it can be of so much better use!
I would love to have so much space for my video-editing. Forget about HDV, AVCHD (and the entire x.264 stuff) let's go totally lossless!
can't they come up with a technology that can record every thing that has happened in your life the whole of your lifetime? i wonder how large the file size would be (depends on reached age), coz i'm thinking that's one thing one can put in that kind of storage.
well, anyway, you have these kind of technologies and humanity surely is quickly approaching godhead ala daneel olivaw in the foundation series of i. asimov
hmmm..
even todays ipods you cant afford enough content to fill them
Right...and 15 years ago no one could imagine a use for anything beyond 10GB...
I'm already maxing out multiple terabytes of storage with RAW files from my Canon cameras and they're only 8MP. Where are we going to put hours and hours of 3K+ resolution video from next gen camcorders like Red's new Scarlet? 500TB+ would be a godsend...
Secondly, where are you going to get the money to fill that thing with songs?
It's just not practical. Don't expect to see a 500,000 GB music player anytime soon.
this is hard storage, like a flash drive, not a spinning disk like in your current hard drive, there are no "seek" speeds, there is just indexing, and with a harddrive that size you can index to your hearts content and not worry about running out of space(which is the current limitation with indexing on current flash drives). OH, and as a side note, I hope this meets with your strict grammar requirements.
People saying "Stooop, stop everything! It's too much storage" Are exactly the type of people that are stopping the ageing of technology. Computers need to step out their infancy and keeping them in diapers is not the way, let the baby walk, let it fall down, but it'll grow along the way and we both will benefit.
People back in the 80's didnt think they would ever use 16MB of RAM (I'm not entirely sure of the amounts back then, I'm only 17) but look at us now, real money bags and technologically inclined people are chewing up 4GB and even 8GB (which I admit, is overkill). So we shouldnt live with the mentality "It's too big", these technologies need tested, proofed and patented before their release anyway rendering this technologies release in at least 2 years? (although we wont see it for longer).
As for read/write speeds, being flash, it should be slower than physical drives but then again, this could be picked up on?
I can only give respect to the likes of Superdonut who stands for something in technology.
Let the baby walk.
Carbon is also a much better conductor than silicon so we could probably expect to see cooler running CPU's etc.
You do realise, it would have been better to put a comma after "Good god".
Weird.
no more **** blog posts! please!
he no more place to put! stop him!
As for the R/W speed - I would expect it to be quite fast. Nanotechnology tends to be highly parallel so it would be like RAID striping hundreds of SSDs.
The myspace generation (sigh).
Do you have any idea how much new information is created each day? And even if we didn't care, sooner or later "they" would convince us that we really need it... I bet that Microsoft's OS around 2020 will need 500.000Gb (memory, of course) just to run a process to update itself.
Stand up for your sonic rights people! The industry is selling way-below-CD-quality-downloadable-sub-par-sonic-crap for MORE than a CD costs, yet the CD has only one or two decent songs. The industry keeps missing it. Now they are even doing it with Audio Books. (Sound Quality not as important there, but AUDIBLE's highest quality downloads are 64k, and they are selling them for MORE than the actual books, with NO OVERHEAD (except for the actor/reader, and some server space). $20-$50 for a 6-8 hour long book at 64k? That's INTOLERAUDIBLE!! They don't even tell you which translations are the classics. I'm not saying stealing is right, but I am saying the industry has done everything it can alienate itself from the public, and to discourage purchasing by offering lower quality, less selection at HIGHER PRICES.
This technology sounds amazing. Let's insist they use it in a way that conveys the beauty of music, the soul of the voice.
Sincerely,
Superdonut
and takes another decade to listen to all of them at least once.