IBM Breakthrough Exponentially Expands Data Storage

[NightHawk21]

Motherflippin' awesome! 10 years may sound like a long time, but hell, 10 years ago I had a 850MB HDD.

Really? Cause in 2002.. I had a hard drive with 20gb on it.(closer to 18 but.. meh) and that was for the time pretty common. Sure that wasnt like 15 or 20 years ago that you had 850 mb?

Hell, maybe you did bro, but I can sympathize with una. I 9my family) bought our first computer when in like the year '99, but it was an old windows 95 pc. Took me another couple years before we even had a computer running xp, and about a year after that to get internet. I still think I have the old harddrive (first one), and I swear to god that the hard drive was no bigger than 512mb. Shit I still have a collection of floppies behind me. Funny thing a year or two ago, some organization was giving away free USB keys which held 2 gigs. Funny how quick tech changes.

OP: Amazing info, can't wait, but can't see how they could go much smaller than this. Maybe isotopes, but then again I only deal with living things at this level so I'm by no means an expert.

 

[NightHawk21]

Seems like once it gets down that small it would become insanely fragile and need some sort of containment to prevent a bump or a breeze from destroying your data.

Normal hard drive are already like that, a single particle of dust inside the enclosure is enough to scrap it.

How about the gyrobowl?

Holy shit it changes the interior food? What sorcery is this?!?

No, but you made me tempted to get one just so I can spill something out of it and prove to the voices in the stupid video that it doesn't work.

 

[Dusk17]

What would you actually need on a 100 terabyte storage. seems like just one that big could hold a lifetime worth of data. I understand why large institutions or businesses could need that but what would a person do that needs that much?

 

[Grey Day for Elcia]

But what will our future be? HDD, or SSD?

What's our priority? Virtually zero load time or not having to uninstall a game, ever again?

DECISIONS! DECISIONS!

Solid state is the way of the future. At least for now. Sort of like how Blu-Rays were the way of the future, but then everyone realized the cloud is better, so... yeah.

Barring size, which isn't an inherent problem to the type of drive itself (it's an issue of expense and evolving tech.) the SSDs utterly smash the HDDs on all grounds. Give it a year or two and solid states will be large enough and cheap enough for the upper tiers of computer users (hardcore gamers, audio editors, programs, etc.) to have them as a standard.

Faster, quieter. faster, longer life span, faster, no moving parts and much less likely to fail, faster. Did I mention they're like ten times faster?

 

[esperandote]

Another world chanching discovery that we'll never see.

 

[Ronald Stepp]

So what happened to storing the complete contents of the Library of Congress in the waveform of a single electron? I saw that R&D article years ago. That still sticks in my mind as something to really look forward to in the future of storage.

 

[gritch]

This sounds great but it's definitely not the first time I've heard of it. It sounds exciting but I think the projection of this being commercially viable in 5 to 10 years is unlikely. Actually making storage this small might be feasibly cheap I doubt devices capable of reading and writing magnetic signatures on an atomic scale are neither small nor cheap. While yes I'd love to have 100TB of memory on something the size of a credit card, it'd do me little good if the only device that can read it is the size of a mini van. It's really exciting but I think it has quite a ways to go still.

 

[thiosk]

I did my Ph.D research using scanning tunneling microscopy.

I must emphasize that the ability to manipulate a 12 atom chain of iron atoms in ultrahigh vacuum (and presumably at 4K, for them to have obtained that image) is an achievement for showing some of the fundamental limits for data storage, but gets us no where closer to actually putting these structures on surfaces and reading them out.

You would never ever want to make a hard disk this way.

 

[Robert Ewing]

Holy fuck... Surely they cannot get any larger than this D: Amazing, well done IBM!

 

[McShizzle]

Ooh this thread is getting all science-y, I like it. Tres cool IBM, tres cool.

 

[manaman]

I read about this research roughly between five and seven years ago. I was under the assumption when I had reason to think about it again last year that it had been canned, or proved unfeasible.

The guy to do it basically made a head that was seven atoms across, shrinking the track space and increasing capacity without introducing new heat errors.

Edit: Heh, yeah, guess it was five years ago I was reading about it. Opening the linked article says "after five years of work."

 

[noahpocalypse]

Random fact: My first computer (around 2005-ish) had 18 GB of storage. Most of it was taken up by a dual-boot with Linux, so even with no other games on there, I lacked enough room for WoW as big as it was then.

OT: Wow. Will this be exponentially expensive? Either way, pretty sweet. I want one.

 

[noahpocalypse]

And the future comes closer!

You know, some day, our great-grandchildren will smirk at how excited we were to have 1-terabyte hard drives the same way we do when we see ads from the early days of computer tech advertising "revolutionary" 16-megabyte drives.

I certainly was amazed when my father(Who worked in computer repair/support) told me a story of when he was installing a 14MB external drive for one of his customers. The man said "How in the world, am I supposed to fill FOURTEEN Megabytes?"

Especially now when we can do a school project(Or some such) and have it clear 20MB easily.

That would be because school projects are typically either PowerPoint or a .doc. PowerPoints have images, thus causing them to be large files, and I have no idea what's wrong with Microsoft. If I type a couple lines into a .doc it should not be a bazillion kilobytes or several megs.

 

[GonzoGamer]

I'm so glad I invested in IBM.
And I'm also very glad that they got rid of their consumer products div. They're so much better at R&D stuff like this then they were at making PCs.
I actually can't wait to get a phone that utilizes this.
This really is very impressive and seeing as though we're running out of atoms, we may need to come up with a new "Law" soon.

Question, what happened to IBM? For quite a while they seemed to have... dissappeared and only recently have I seen them coming back into the real world. Or have I just been blind? The same thing happened with the Commodore systems

In 2004 IBM sold their consumer PC division to lenovo. Since then they've been doing a lot of government work and R&D stuff like this data storage. Smart move on their part, their consumer PC div was pretty lame: I used to have a netvista/piece of shit pc worthy of an Adam Sandler song.

I don't know about commodore (never had one but I did have a Commodores album back then) but I think there's a gaming PC company that makes a current caliber gaming PC in a Commodore64 shell.

 

[Phishfood]

But what will our future be? HDD, or SSD?

What's our priority? Virtually zero load time or not having to uninstall a game, ever again?

DECISIONS! DECISIONS!

Duh, SSD cache with "installed" games and HDD archive with all the files saved. "Install" game to SSD then launch. Best of both.

I mean, whats the point of HAVING cake if you can't even EAT it?

 

[Siege_TF]

Shame it came juuuust a little too late to prevent the Playstation Vita from being a failure.

 

[bap789]

my roomate's aunt makes $83/hr on the laptop. She has been without work for 8 months but last month her pay was $8682 just working on the laptop for a few hours. Read more on this site...Nuttyrich . com

 

[lockgar]

This is great, to bad I doubt we will see this at a reasonable price. I'm willing to bet they had this for way longer.

 

[salinv]

Great news, love to see new tech being invented. The thing is though, this tech will be damn expensive. A major flaw of this new tech (at least as it currently stands) is that it requires temperatures of 1 K to be usable, and the magnetic bits become unstable at temperatures of 5 K. That is a little bit impractical for consumer uses. Hopefully someone can get around this problem, but I fear it will be more than 10 years to get around that flaw...

Edit: Or they increase the atoms; I just noticed in the source article that they think if they increase the atom size to around 150 atoms it would be stable at room temp. An order of magnitude less impressive, but still impressive.