Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes. Demonstrating this stuff is possible isn't the hard part, it seems. Productionizing it is. You have to have exceedingly fast read and write speeds: who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it, or if you produce data faster than you…
> who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it To be fair, if I'm reading an exabyte in a month, my hardware's pushing >3 Tbps, which I'd be very happy with.
447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane
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Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane
#82Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes. Demonstrating this stuff is possible isn't the hard part, it seems. Productionizing it is. You have to have exceedingly fast read and write speeds: who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it, or if you produce data faster than you…
Of course, wouldn't you expect that for a fairly mature technology that you'd get tons of false starts from competing tech before eventually getting one breakthrough that completely changed everything? I mean, you could have written a comment that was perfectly analogous to your paragraph above about how AI and neural networks never really amounted to much for about 50-60 years until, all of the sudden, they did (and even if you think AI may currently be overhyped, it's undeniable that in the past 5 years that AI has had an effect on society probably much greater than all the previous history of AI put together).
I prefer to read this academic paper as "Oh, this is a really interesting approach, I wonder what its limitations are" vs. interpreting at as a "this new storage tech will change the world!!!" announcement. I feel like the first approach leads to generally more curiosity, while the second just leads to cynicism and jadedness.
Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane
#83This is a pipe dream and I’m almost tempted to say a fever dream. The chemistry part seems somewhat sound, even though that’s outside of my field of expertise. But the entire readout process is questionable, and has clear signs of heavy AI writing. The AFM mechanism described as “tier 1” (very strong LLMism, btw) is somewhat optimistic but realistic. The fields needed are large compared to usual values in solid state…
Author here. Some fair points, some misreadings. The caching comment refers to the Tier 1 controller holding a bitmap of bits it has already scanned — standard practice in any scanning probe system. It's not competing with the storage medium for capacity. Tier 2 is explicitly labeled speculative. The paper's validation target is Tier 1: one C-AFM scan, one voltage pulse, existing equipment. The core contribution is n…
Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane
#84Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes. Demonstrating this stuff is possible isn't the hard part, it seems. Productionizing it is. You have to have exceedingly fast read and write speeds: who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it, or if you produce data faster than you…
Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane
#85Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes. Demonstrating this stuff is possible isn't the hard part, it seems. Productionizing it is. You have to have exceedingly fast read and write speeds: who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it, or if you produce data faster than you…
Red LEDs were invented / discovered in 1920s, became commercially successful as indicators in 1960s. Optical fibers were invented in 1920s or so, became a commercial success in 1980s.
Certain things just take time. Do not dismiss a good physical effect, they are much more rare than so-called good ideas.
Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane
#86Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes. Demonstrating this stuff is possible isn't the hard part, it seems. Productionizing it is. You have to have exceedingly fast read and write speeds: who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it, or if you produce data faster than you…
> You probably don't want to have to need a separate device to read and a device to write. I don’t think this would bother the average enterprise in the least. We used to have entire rooms dedicated to tape libraries that housed dozens of tape drives and thousands of tapes each. The read and write speed are absolutely critical but having to utilize multiple devices isn’t anything new at all.
Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane
#87Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes. Demonstrating this stuff is possible isn't the hard part, it seems. Productionizing it is. You have to have exceedingly fast read and write speeds: who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it, or if you produce data faster than you…
It took 15 if not 20 years to commercialize even such obvious, low-tech thing as radio telegraph, which can literally be built form common house supplies. It happened about 60 years after Maxwell predicted the electromagnetic waves theoretically. Red LEDs were invented / discovered in 1920s, became commercially successful as indicators in 1960s. Optical fibers were invented in 1920s or so, became a commercial success…
Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane
#88Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took 15 if not 20 years to commercialize even such obvious, low-tech thing as radio telegraph, which can literally be built form common house supplies. It happened about 60 years after Maxwell predicted the electromagnetic waves theoretically. Red LEDs were invented / discovered in 1920s, became commercially successful as indicators in 1960s. Optical fibers were invented in 1920s or so, became a commercial success…
It feels a little disjointed to compare old tech. Computing tech iteration cycles and adoption rates seem more interesting than things at the dawn of communications technology.
Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane
#90Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes. Demonstrating this stuff is possible isn't the hard part, it seems. Productionizing it is. You have to have exceedingly fast read and write speeds: who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it, or if you produce data faster than you…
It took 15 if not 20 years to commercialize even such obvious, low-tech thing as radio telegraph, which can literally be built form common house supplies. It happened about 60 years after Maxwell predicted the electromagnetic waves theoretically. Red LEDs were invented / discovered in 1920s, became commercially successful as indicators in 1960s. Optical fibers were invented in 1920s or so, became a commercial success…