Topic: Abit hard to believe, 12.8 Million GB storage...

[Sirgod]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/10/ferroelectric_storage/

Scientists call on water power for future storage

Materials scientists have said water and wires could offer limitless storage. With the help of H2O, nanoscale ferroelectric effects will store binary information at unprecedented densities - they hope.

The ferroelectric effect is where electrical poles are induced by applying an electrical field. The orientation of the poles can be flipped to encode data. Until now, a big problem for ferroelectric memory was the stability of the data because of problems dampening charges forming on the surface of the ferroelectric material.A team from Drexel and Pennsylvania universities says the answer unexpectedly comes from humble water*. They used barium titanium oxide nanowires 100,000 times finer than a human hair as the ferroelectric material. Hydroxl ions found in the wet stuff surrounded the wires, stabilising the orientation of the poles. The water-based method is more reliable than traditional metal electrode stabilisation.

Research leader Dr Jonathan Spanier said: “It is astonishing to see that molecules enable a wire having a diameter equivalent to fewer than 10 atoms to act as a stable and switchable dipole memory element.”

The potential of the effect for data storage has long been recognised, but the team says this new breakthrough makes the prospect more realistic. A cubic centimetre of ferroelectric memory could hold as much as 12.8m GB of data, they reckon. As well as unimaginably huge hard drive capacity, the technology offers the possiblity of RAM as fast as current silicon, that is not wiped when the computer is off.

The next challenge is to find reliable ways of assembling the nanowires in packed arrays. As you might expect, industry is watching this field closely. Apparently, Spanier is in contact with “major semiconductor device manufacturers”. ®

*Spanier et al. (2006) Ferroelectric Phase Transition in Individual Single-Crystalline BaTiO3 Nanowires. Nano Letters 6, 735-739.

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Maybe It's the layout of The Register site, but I just have a hard time believing this.

Stephen

[Javora]

The amount of storage is not totally out of the realm of possability, I've heard of similar storage size with Holographic from MaximumPC issues on and off for about a six months now.  But this is the first time I've heard any storage solutions regarding the use of water.  Since this came from the Register that has been known for their crap bag "joke articles" I don't believe anything they write about anymore.  So if I see a article from a more respected source, I'll listen until then I'll take the article with a grain of salt or in this case a drop of water.

[Sirgod]

That's kinda what I was thinking also. It just didn't seem to me like a reliable source.

Stephen

[Bonk]

I saw this somewhere else, forget where now though. I don't doubt it. Definitely just a temporary technology as undoubtedly holographic storage will be far superior. Its just a matter of time.

I think it was over a decade ago I came across the Microsoft Teraserver, which had a full terabyte of data online in a single database. I have also read of petabyte sized disk arrays with current technology. We definitely need these kind of improvements in storage, especially with the pervasive traffic monitoring and data collection today. (probably the biggest single factor driving storage research)

edit: ah here it is:

http://www.drexel.edu/univrel/dateline/default_nik.pl?p=releaseview&of=1&f=20060508-01

[Just plain old Punisher]

Bah, it will be used to store porn.

[Tus-XC]

Bah, it will be used to store porn.

Don't tell me you have enough to fill that kinda HD pun....

[Commander Maxillius]

Bah, it will be used to store porn.

Don't tell me you have enough to fill that kinda HD pun....

Gotta use that NSA security clearance for something, eh?

[Just plain old Punisher]

Bah, it will be used to store porn.

Don't tell me you have enough to fill that kinda HD pun....

Gotta use that NSA security clearance for something, eh?

You know, funny thing, recently the government/military has launched a crack down on using classified military networks for transmitting porn =P It's kinda funny, but people are using networks like SIPRA.NET to share porn -- and the mere act of transmitting ANYTHING over these networks automatically makes the material classified. So we have classified bewbie pics goin back and forth the country. Gives new meaning to the term "EYES ONLY". LOL. Kinda funny if misusing government networks didn't get you 5-10 years in federal prison.