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Scientists pave the way for large-scale storage at the atomic level

economist.com

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Re: Scientists pave the way for large-scale storage at the atomic level

#71

Post by goldenkey »

saganus wrote: post #56
goldenkey wrote: post #6

This is pure buzz. Physical storage does not make any sense when light based or magnetic based storage is much faster and denser. It only makes sense if it is very permanent, ie. Etching sapphire discs [1] The position of atoms is just one classical property. Quantum properties like spin and charge are much more numerous and versatile. [1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/nanoform-laser-etched...

That sapphire disc tech is very interesting. And while browsing their product sheet [1], I thought this would be great for me to store my most valuable stuff. And then it hit me... if I bought the 500 or even the 2500 document disc... what would I save there? Probably some family pictures (unfortunately it doesn't seem to support colors, understandably so), a paper I published years ago. Maybe my college thesis. Lega…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram

Fidelity is going to be a big issue though. I don't think the sapphire discs have enough storage density and capacity to hold a spectrogram of even mediocre sample rate. If you do the math let me know if I'm wrong. I'd be curious to listen to an mp3 af the simulated fidelity of a sapphire disc.

Re: Scientists pave the way for large-scale storage at the atomic level

#72

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

saganus wrote: post #56
goldenkey wrote: post #6

This is pure buzz. Physical storage does not make any sense when light based or magnetic based storage is much faster and denser. It only makes sense if it is very permanent, ie. Etching sapphire discs [1] The position of atoms is just one classical property. Quantum properties like spin and charge are much more numerous and versatile. [1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/nanoform-laser-etched...

That sapphire disc tech is very interesting. And while browsing their product sheet [1], I thought this would be great for me to store my most valuable stuff. And then it hit me... if I bought the 500 or even the 2500 document disc... what would I save there? Probably some family pictures (unfortunately it doesn't seem to support colors, understandably so), a paper I published years ago. Maybe my college thesis. Lega…

The resolution is too low to store even a single stereo FLAC file of a three minute song.

But this isn't really a viable digital storage system. It's a nice novelty, but it's not designed for serialisation in the way that optical ROM systems are.

It might be possible to increase the resolution with a better laser and optics, and make the disks serialisable. But I suspect you still wouldn't get the density you need for practical media storage.

Re: Scientists pave the way for large-scale storage at the atomic level

#73

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ArtDev wrote: post #63

Datacenter on the moon? At -200 degrees Celsius in the shade, the temperature on the moon is perfect. Of course, moving the data would be a problem but it would be a great backup solution!

You could do a daily backup of the entire Internet to something smaller than a thumb drive. :)

Re: Scientists pave the way for large-scale storage at the atomic level

#74

Post by aidenn0 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #72
saganus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sapphire disc tech is very interesting. And while browsing their product sheet [1], I thought this would be great for me to store my most valuable stuff. And then it hit me... if I bought the 500 or even the 2500 document disc... what would I save there? Probably some family pictures (unfortunately it doesn't seem to support colors, understandably so), a paper I published years ago. Maybe my college thesis. Lega…

The resolution is too low to store even a single stereo FLAC file of a three minute song. But this isn't really a viable digital storage system. It's a nice novelty, but it's not designed for serialisation in the way that optical ROM systems are. It might be possible to increase the resolution with a better laser and optics, and make the disks serialisable. But I suspect you still wouldn't get the density you need fo…

I think you're wrong.

Their smallest listed item (1" medallion) is 110 megapixels. Even storing just 1 bit per pixel (which is conservative) you can store almost 3 minutes of CD-quality FLAC[1]. Seeing as it's grayscale, you can almost certainly store multiple bits per pixel. At even 2bpp, you would have plenty of space for 3 minutes of flac, plus some form of BCH code.

The largest listed item is 30GP, which would probably be enough for over a day of FLAC audio.

1: 110Mbit / (32bits/sample * 44100 samples/s) ~= 78s of uncompressed audio. FLAC is roughly 50% compression ratio, so ~= 2:36 of FLAC.

[edit]

In case people were wondering: the reason this didn't pass my "sniff" test is that War and Peace is shown on an example prototype. That is ~3MB in UTF-8 and a grayscale picture of a page of text at a readable resolution is about 2 orders of magnitude larger than the binary representation, and 300MB is obviously way more than a 3 minute FLAC.

Re: Scientists pave the way for large-scale storage at the atomic level

#75

Post by goldenkey »

stcredzero wrote: post #46
ska wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it the tract record isn't actually that good.

track

If you're going to correct people, at least specify the correction unambiguously. Pedantry is uhpaulleng.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/track%20record

Re: Scientists pave the way for large-scale storage at the atomic level

#76

Post by UnquietTinkerer »

flashingleds wrote: post #55

This is because it just got published in Nature something, the earlier open arXiv version from April is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.02265 Figure 3 is absolutely spectacular, and deserves to be admired by the whole world. A comment on the inevitable promises of revolutionized data storage: Yes the areal density is fantastically high (>500Tbit / square inch as opposed to 1Tbit/in^2 in bleeding edge HDDs / NAND fla…

Practicality aside, that was a fascinating and very well-written paper. Thank you for posting it.

Re: Scientists pave the way for large-scale storage at the atomic level

#77

Post by smellf »

neckro23 wrote: post #36
smellf wrote: post #29

> Dr Otte reports read speeds of 1-2 minutes per block. He reckons he could boost those speeds drastically, to about a megabit per second. That would be a big improvement, but still thousands of times slower than modern hard drives. Try tens of times slower. There would absolutely be applications for nonvolatile memory that reads at 1 Mbps but has this kind of insane memory density. For most applications you'd probab…

Thousands is correct. A magnetic hard disk has a bandwidth of well over 1 Gbps. Long-term stability (and this would only be any good for long-term storage, at that rate!) is a pretty tall order. Even current storage methods can't really manage it.

Well, I did mix up my units - I should have said hundreds. Megabits is a weird unit to use for hard drives.

But read speeds on a spinning HDD are typically going to be between 50-100MBps, so 400-800 Mbps.

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