Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

zenodo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 169 posts

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#91

Post by bastawhiz »

loneboat wrote: post #70
bastawhiz wrote: post #60

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.

But if you need 1eb, waiting a whole month for it isn't great. You'd be better off with 720 1pb devices taking an hour in parallel.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#92

Post by bastawhiz »

tw04 wrote: post #77
bastawhiz wrote: post #60

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…

> 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.

It doubles design, development, and manufacturing cost, potentially doubling your supply chain. It's not a problem for the consumer.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#93

Post by cameldrv »

bastawhiz wrote: post #60

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…

I have no idea if this is practical but I remember when flash memory was this suspicious semi-science fiction thing too. There are probably some people on this site that remember the same for DRAM. There have been loads of things in between that didn't make it. Some of them were semi-crackpot, some actually went into production like bubble memory and Optane. Few of them have met the sweet spot of the market in a way that let them move from a niche to a dominant form of memory, but still I wouldn't discount that it's possible to invent a new form of memory that will take over the world!

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#94

Post by Dylan16807 »

bastawhiz wrote: post #91
loneboat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But if you need 1eb, waiting a whole month for it isn't great. You'd be better off with 720 1pb devices taking an hour in parallel.

Yes it causes problems in this increasingly narrow situation.

Massive storage that takes a month to fully read is acceptable in a wide variety of use cases. If it's cheaper than hard drives it'll get a huge amount of users.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#95

Post by d--b »

I don’t understand the comments here. They say in the last paragraph:

> A scanning-probe prototype already constitutes a functional non-volatile memory device with areal density exceeding all existing technologies by more than five orders of magnitude.

Are we supposed to read all these stories as lies?

Now it doesn’t say that this is easy to produce, but if those claims are true, it doesn’t really matter if it is very expensive.

It doesn’t say either if the stuff can withstand live conditions.

It’s annoying not to be able to trust whether solutions like these are viable or not.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#96

Post by brookst »

Firerouge wrote: post #81
loneboat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Plus just put 32 in stripping RAID if you really need to read an exabyte a day

*RAED

Or maybe RAEND

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#97

Post by iliatoli »

d--b wrote: post #95

I don’t understand the comments here. They say in the last paragraph: > A scanning-probe prototype already constitutes a functional non-volatile memory device with areal density exceeding all existing technologies by more than five orders of magnitude. Are we supposed to read all these stories as lies? Now it doesn’t say that this is easy to produce, but if those claims are true, it doesn’t really matter if it is ver…

The scanning-probe claim is real — C-AFM on fluorographane is achievable with existing commercial instruments. The paper is a computational prediction with a detailed experimental protocol. An experimental collaborator is preparing the validation now. The 'live conditions' question is addressed in Section 5 (radiation hardness, mechanical damage, defect physics).

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#98

Post by Dylan16807 »

skycrafter0 wrote: post #86
tw04 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Used to? We absolutely still do. LTO is a widely used format, and as far as I'm aware, it is "picking up more steam" each year.

In terms of capacity, LTO sales are increasing. In terms of tape count and drive count, there's been a steady decline.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#99

Post by herodoturtle »

bastawhiz wrote: post #91
loneboat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But if you need 1eb, waiting a whole month for it isn't great. You'd be better off with 720 1pb devices taking an hour in parallel.

In long term archival use cases this is less of an issue. Especially if it’s many exabytes we’re talking about, needing to be stored for decades.

But I 100% agree with your main point about possibility vs productionisation.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#100

Post by topspin »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #83
iliatoli wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Dude, you _have_ to write things in your own words if you want to be taken seriously. "The is not — it's " will cause a bunch of people to disengage, and those people have high overlap with the people who may fund you.

"Dude, you _have_ to write things in your own words if you want to be taken seriously."

How is this lost on people? Everything that contains the slightest hint of "AI slop" is instantly panned anywhere it appears, and yet people such as Ilia Toli appear to be entirely oblivious to this.

It's tragic. There is at least a non-zero chance that this work is a world changing breakthrough. It's clear, based on his engagement with comments here, that he at least believes this. And yet the first thing the guy does with it is debase it all using a clanker.

It boggles the mind.

We're seeing this throughout academe, in courts with both lawyers and judges, and among lawmakers and journalists. Several times a week one or another of these makes another headline for misapplying "AI". It seems that the work for which we are all expected to have the highest regard is coming from people that are completely witless; both unaware of how transparent this is and unaware of the consequences.

You have to be deeply ensconced inside an impenetrable bubble to do that to yourself.

Post reply on HN