1.2 Petabyte Hard Disks
p2p news / p2pnet: Can you imagine world without data compression? And where you never have to back anything up?
US inventor Michael Thomas, owner of Colossal Storage, hopes to achieve exactly that. He says he's the first person to solve non-contact optical spintronics which will in turn utlimately result in the creation of 3.5-inch discs with a million times the capacity of any hard drive - 1.2 petabytes of storage, to be exact.
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"Normally all the electrons could spin randomly working against the best electrical signal. The electrons are also capable of spinning in both directions a once. But my unique method for creating uniform in-sync spinning electrons will for the first time allow a whole new field of science and electronics to emerge.
"With the ability to control electron spin we will see much smaller electronic devices on the market."
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"One field under study is optical spintronics following Faradays laws," Thomas continues. "The potential data capacity is enormous, and there'd be a very high data transfer rate. Consequently, there'd be no need for expensive compression software like MPEG and others, and no need to backup data."
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Thomas' agent in Japan is in talks with "several big name companies," he states, saying he expects it'll be two to three years before prototypes will be built.
"I'd say we can expect a finished product to be on the market in about four to five years," he says, adding the cost would probably be in the range of $750 each.
By the time this will come to pass, we will likely be very mobile with our computer systems (see The Future Of Computers for details). We will probably be logging our entire lives in real time constantly.
And why not... it only costs a fraction of the total storage capacity we'll have available.
3 comments:
Um, 1.2 PBytes is 1,000,000 times the capacity of any hard drive? By my nitpicking calculations, that "any hard drive" is a whopping great 1.2GBytes or 1/100th the capacity of my 2yr old HD.
'Scuze if I dropped a decimal point somewhere.
That's a good observation slyborg.
1.2 Petabyte is already fairly impressive. I don't see why this article needed to exaggerate.
Isn't it estimated that our brains are operating with an equivalent of only 100TB? So we're getting close to be able to backup our brains on a hard drive? Theoretically of course since we don't have the scanning technics yet. But since they are also getting better all the time...
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