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Scientists pave the way for large-scale storage at the atomic level
- juancassim1 10y agoInteresting. Hadn't considered the applications of atomic storage before
- nik61 10y agohttp://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/Ms_fnd_in_a_Lbry.html http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/Ms_fnd_in_a_Lbry.html
- saganus 10y agoWow! Excellent read!. It's even more impressive since the footnote says: "This story first appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1961" Fifty-five years ago! It reminds me of a recent hn article (if anyone has a link it would be great!) that I believe it was about how Dropbox tests it's storage system, layer by layer, and the final error graph is always a flat line at "0", since every error is caught and corrected in one of the layers below. Will it ever reach the case where it will be impossible to really guarantee that we have the right data? PS: I can't seem to find the article using Algolia or even Google... maybe it was not Dropbox but other storage company? I really would like to find this story but for some reason never marked it as favorite or even upvoted it! (maybe I wasn't logged in).
- moreati 10y agoPerhaps it was https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/07/pocket-watch/ https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/07/pocket-watch/ ? > we use a variant on Reed-Solomon erasure coding that is similar to Local Reconstruction Codes > according to this model, a given block in Magic Pocket is safe with 99.9999999999999999999999999% probability!
- saganus 10y agoAwesome! Yes, exactly that. I tried searching for "petabyte" but I guess I came 1 order of magnitude short... Thanks a lot! It was driving me crazy..
- markhahn 10y agoanyone else notice that some of the transcriptions seem wrong, assuming a fixed 8-bit encoding? for instance. the "rrange" doesn't have two columns with identical bits.
- cr1895 10y agoLook at the rows
- goldenkey 10y agoThis 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-sapphire-data-storage/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/nanoform-laser-etched...
- Nanite 10y agoTrue, unfortunately most scientists are nowadays practically obligated to state a potential real world use case for their research in their publications even when they are engaging in basic research. And mainstream media rather naively picks up on these statements.
- saganus 10y agoThat 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. Legal documents perhaps like birth certificates and such. But then I wished I could store music. Is there any graphical representation of music that would suit this format? Or is the only reasonable option to store the actual 1's and 0's of an MP3 or something like that? [1] http://www.fahrenheit2451.com/index.php/shop http://www.fahrenheit2451.com/index.php/shop
- goldenkey 10y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram 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.
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- stephanheijl 10y agoWhile this is very intesting, the storage mentioned does seem somewhat small to me. The article compares the area covered by the text to be a little smaller than a HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus). However, the genome of HIV apparently stores approximately 9.2kb (kilo basepairs, not kilobytes, so ~18KiB) of information. It also doesn't need to be kept at -196C. Are there any viable tactics for atom-based storage that could rival this density?
- dexwiz 10y agoGenetic storage is way more resistant to bit rot than conventional computers. DNA is not stable, has a full time support system fixing it, and still has a relatively high mutation rate. But biological systems on the whole are much more resistant to individual errors. Yes, single mutations can cause horrible diseases, but these mutations are either in the active site of proteins, or disrupt folding. A large portion of proteins are "bulk." If you look at protein simulations, only a small section of the protein is simulated, and the rest is just approximated as charged mass. Changes there are much less impactful and noticeable. As for it to be a disease, it had to be present at time of concept. If it happens during life (which is does, millions of times a day), the cell either ignores it or dies.
- dekhn 10y agoDNA kept cool and dry is stable for millenia. Any storage done with DNA would likely be done in a fixed environment outside of the cell.
- choicewords 10y agoI thought natural radioactive decay was sufficient to mangle DNA.
- dekhn 10y agominimal shielding and non-radioactive storage elements suffice.
- dexwiz 10y agoFrom -269ºC to -196ºC is actually a huge improvement. Its the difference between liquid helium (expensive) to liquid nitrogen (cheap). Getting something that cold is hard, but keeping it there is just a matter of insulation. There seems to be a different kind of physics when you get that cold. Stable single atom structures, superconducting magnets, etc. It's all based around the idea that nanometer structures are now stable. The big issue with bringing these kind of products to the general market is that we operate at a much higher temperature, the range of liquid water. And these technologies may never be able to improved to a point that they work at room temperature. Instead of moving those technologies into our range, I think could focus on moving our technologies to that range and improving/shrinking containment vessels. Self contained units with periodic maintenance/refills are viable (eg vacuum tubes). Having someone to top off a super computer's liquid nitrogen every couple of weeks is not a hard ask. We just have to make everything else work at that temperature so the entire unit can be cooled and contained, instead of just a specific section. Integrated circuit boards are already black boxes to 99.9% of the public, so sealing them in a cooled vessel is viable. I know MRI/NMR machines already operate at that range, but they are way to big/specialized to be considered the general market. No one has an MRI machine in their medicine cabinet. I was once interning for a chemist, and asked if he ever thought we would have desktop NMR machines. He said there was no way they would ever be small enough. I then pointed at his laptop and remarked that is what people thought about computers 50 years ago.
- coldcode 10y agoThe problem I see is what happens if the temperature doesn't stay in the required range for whatever reason like power failures, earthquakes, sloppy maintenance - you lose the data. Having such an enormous storage that is so fragile seems to have limited usefulness. If they ever get it to room temperature and have it be stabile then it might be more interesting.
- stephengillie 10y agoWe already have a demand for very large, very-high-speed storage with in-memory databases. We already fill this need with highly-volatile RAM, and back it with more-persistent magnetic storage. From the article, this is seen as a replacement for persistent storage, for which it will need a lot more stability and temperature work.
- mjhirn 10y agoI am wondering if the technique described in this Nature publication from yesterday [1] to potentially operate quantum computers at room temperature, could be used for the atomic storage as well. Does anyone know? [1]: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160718/ncomms12232/full/ncomms12232.html http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160718/ncomms12232/full/nc...
- smellf 10y ago> 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 probably have to make the technology stable at room temperature though.
- neckro23 10y agoThousands 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.
- smellf 10y agoWell, 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.
- skykooler 10y agoEspecially if you could make the read heads small enough that you could read from several atomic lattices in parallel.
- guelo 10y agoSure, maintain your chlorine lattice at -196ºC and then use your handy scanning tunneling microscope to manually move atoms around. I would say "paving the way to large-scale storage" is extremely generous for what they actually achieved, to the point of being incorrect.
- deegles 10y agoHow vulnerable is this to cosmic rays?
- flashingleds 10y agoThis is because it just got published in Nature something, the earlier open arXiv version from April is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.02265 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 flash, if I crunched the numbers correctly). But it requires ultrahigh vacuum, preparation of a clean copper crystal, dosing with copper chloride and then writing/reading with a scanning tunneling microscope, maintaining liquid nitrogen temperature. Also a modern SSD will write about 500MB in a second, while this method would write 500MB in 240 years. I don't mean to slag it off; we should all appreciate it for being an absolutely wonderful and awe inspiring technical feat. Just don't get carried away dreaming of the applications in your laptop/server/phone.
- Dylan16807 10y agoPretty cool, but keep in mind that it's at a massive scalability disadvantage compared to flash because of the requirement for a read/write head. Current 3D flash may only be 1.7Tbpsi, but that's with a layer 4 microns thick. Make it a millimeter thick and you're in the same areal density range.
- UnquietTinkerer 10y agoPracticality aside, that was a fascinating and very well-written paper. Thank you for posting it.
- ArtDev 10y agoDatacenter 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!
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoYou could do a daily backup of the entire Internet to something smaller than a thumb drive. :)
- audleman 10y agoThis technology is amazing, but what's even more amazing is that writing at the atomic level is only 100x denser than what we've already achieved.