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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

#131

Post by Liftyee »

londons_explore wrote: post #105
Dylan16807 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's notable that 'time to read/write entire device' has been creeping up for any storage device you can buy off the shelf for the past ~40 years. Reading a floppy disk took around 30 secs for example. A whole CD took 5 mins. My whole 1TB SSD takes 10 mins.

Interesting, this is my first time consciously thinking about this trend.

Perhaps the needs for read/write speed are bounded (before processor, etc. becomes the limiting factor), while more capacity is only limited by price. Or maybe increasing density of storage inherently means a tradeoff with I/O speed (AFAIK, NAND flash needs to rewrite lots of data just to make a single write? Atom-scale interactions have side effects)

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

#132

Post by rowanG077 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #98
skycrafter0 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think there are public numbers. No doubt IBM knows. I do expect that trend to reverse this year if true.

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

#134

Post by lijok »

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 > You probably don't want to have to need a separate device to read and a device to write

Are you only thinking about home consumer applications?

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

#135

Post by zozbot234 »

cynicalkane wrote: post #61
dgfl wrote: post #44

This 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…

Yes, this paper is insane. The actual quote about caching is: > Once a region of tape has been read, the controller stores the result. Subsequent operations reference the cache rather than re-interrogating the physical medium. Re-reading a known bit is unnecessary; the controller already holds its state However, earlier, the paper claims: > The transformer architectures underpin- ning modern large language models are…

> Yes, this paper is insane.

Given the amount of AI writing involved, I'm pretty sure that you actually meant "this paper is inane". Or maybe both!

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

#137

Post by iliatoli »

ethmarks wrote: post #136

Pardon my ignorance, but why does the "447 TB/cm^2" density value use square centimeters instead of a volume unit? Does the information capacity of this material really scale in proportion to area? How? Or is it just a typo?

fluorographane is a single atomic layer — one carbon thick — so storage density is naturally per unit area. The paper also gives volumetric density for the nanotape spool architecture (0.4–9 ZB/cm³, Section 4.4).

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

#138

Post by volemo »

atoav wrote: post #123
mastermage wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Street Infrastructure needeed to drive anywhere (kinda).

Ok, and where does the energy to consistently keep a weight in the air come from and is it really worth spending? I know flying cars are some sort of futuristic trope, yet I cringe at it every time I see it. They always assume magical infinite power. In the real the reason we do not have flying cars is the same why you don't use a drone as a coat hanger at home: It is just more practical to use a mechanical solution…

What do you mean “we don’t have flying cars”? What are helicopters then?

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

#139

Post by volemo »

lijok wrote: post #134
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 > You probably don't want to have to need a separate device to read and a device to write Are you only thinking about home consumer applications?

I’m not sure what the GP is thinking, but I would love a cheap-ish exabyte storage even if it takes a month to read fully. Damn, I’d gladly take it even if the speed is comparable to an SSD! (Though the price would be a question of course.)

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

#140

Post by Dylan16807 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #132
Dylan16807 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think there are public numbers. No doubt IBM knows. I do expect that trend to reverse this year if true.

https://www.lto.org/2025/07/lto-tape-technology-shipments-sc...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/23/lto_2024_tape_shipmen...

Unless something is wrong with these numbers, it's simple enough to do rough math to get tape count and compare with historical numbers.

Claims of 5.7 or 5.8 million drives over the lifetime of the format can also be compared to older data to see a slowdown.

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