Wednesday 22 September 2010

Researchers close in on six petabit hard drive

  
"Computer scientists in China are close to creating the next-generation of computer storage devices, capable of holding more than six petabits of data on a single five-inch disc. The only hurdle is making the tech fast enough to write data at the speeds such a drive would require.

Current hard drives are capped at around three terabytes, with manufacturers such as Seagate and Western Digital constantly trying to push that envelope further, every year. This new drive would allow for a storage space of around 768 terabytes. That’s enough storage for around 31,000 Blu-rays, 200,000 DVDs or, if you really wanted to, 500 million floppies.

The technique records on ultra-thin, ferromagnetic films, and rapidly reverses the film’s magnetisation with a laser. Such reversal could take less than a nanosecond to achieve, meaning that the new magneto-optical drives would be faster, by up to thirty times current drive speeds, as well as much bigger.

However, magnetised ferromagnetic film is just one of many different technologies that have purported to make drives bigger, faster and one step ahead of the solid state memory that threatens their existence. But creating new storage tech has been notoriously hard to achieve.

For example, take proposed holographic data storage solutions. These work with light instead of magnetics, utilising non-linear recording and reading to enable massively fast data transfer rates. Researchers concentrating on this technology believed holographic hard drives could store data for more than 50 years, far exceeding magnetic drives life expectancy.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest holographic storage creators, InPhase Technologies, was shut down earlier this year. Despite working on the tech for over nine years, and spending upwards of $100 million (£63 million), the company closed its doors without ever shipping a product.

Another theoretical storage solution would see discs coated in light-sensitive proteins, produced by a genetically altered microbe. Such organic-tech could see up to 50 terabytes being held on a single disc. However, since prototypes were made in 2006, and promises for commercial USB drives and DVDs were made, we haven’t seen any info since.

It’s a hugely tough market to enter. With drives increasing in speed and capacity at meteoric rates, year on year, releasing a new type of storage technology is like trying to jump onto a speeding train." Wired.com

38 comments:

  1. the ammount of memory is just phenomenal...500thousand floppies? christ, that must have been half of a production year

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  2. OMG 6 petabytes? That's crazy, but knowing the evolution of computers that will be nothing in a few decades lol.

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. oh my god cant wait for bigger hards

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  5. do what u want couse a pirate is free!You're a Pirate!!
    cool!suppin bro :)
    check both my blogs are interesting! ;)

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  6. I don't even know what a petabit is, so you know it has to be good!

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  7. so much pirated hd on one of those things

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  8. 500 Million Floppy discs? :O I can't even fathom that much space, or how you could use that much.

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  9. Finally a big enough hard drive to hold all my porn!

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  10. HAHAHA Cockshiner.

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  11. It took under a decade to go from 1 Gigabyte drives to 1 Terrabyte drives. I'm sure in the next decade we will hit 1 Petabyte drives.

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  12. that'll make room for a lot of porn.

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  13. Finally, somewhere to put my porn

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  14. I could really use that space right now, it will be interesting to see how long it takes. If you track the history of hard drives you see everything's just increasing at an exponential rate.

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  15. Dang man, sucks about that holo-company. Following this one.

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  16. what ever happed to holographic hardrives and stuff

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  17. its 500 million randy, and i'm sure they're in the works peedewba =D

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  18. dang.. imagine all the pr0n you can get..

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  19. oh i need this! my 2tb drive is almost full.

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  20. haha, i didn't know that?! or did i? good post anyway :D

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  21. great info.. thanks a bunch

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  22. 768 terabytes???
    wow, I would appreciate this hahaha...
    that's too much

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  23. Soon my HDD will contain all the worlds knowledge! Mwahaa

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  24. @Lithian Lord: Yeah, no kidding O_O

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  25. WANT!

    (in need to store my massive amount of pr0n)

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  26. The size of these things is just getting unimaginable. Just think of how much room you could save in your house by having everything stored digitally.The way things are going, that's the way the future is going to be.

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