p2pnet - rss feed: 1.2 petabytes of storage
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.
To put that into perspective, mega is 1,024 times kilo, giga is 1,024 times mega, tera is 1,024 times giga and peta is 1,024 times tera.
Back in May, 2004, we wrote, “Electrons’ electro magnetic properties cause an interesting effect that you depend on. Absolutely. It’s called electricity and electric current is measured by the abundance, or lack, of electrons in the ferroelectric nucleus, better known as voltage or static charge. Ferroelectric spintronics is, in turn, the method by which electric fields and photons change the properties of ferroelectric molecules.”
In the past, data storage has only been able to orient the direction a field of electrons as they move around a molecule, Thomas told p2pnet. “But now there’s a way to rotate or spin the individual electrons that make up, or surround, the molecule,” he says.
“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.”
An analogy would be our solar system with all the planets circling the Sun in a clockwise direction. Spintronics would add spin to the planets and their moons in a determined direction as they rotated around the sun.
“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.”
The goal of spintronics is to generate a perfect spin current using an electric field and UV photons in a high-k dipole dielectric material like a ferroelectric molecule, says Thomas, going on:
“It was important for the material to be a bianry dipole that could then be made reversible, have non-dissipative of power, and not suffer from leakage current lost over time.”
What would this mean to you? It would allow the manufacture of double sided disks made by separating the ferroelectric molecular coating layers by a plastic, metal, glass, or ceramic substrate.
And how would this allow you to store immense amounts of data on the discs?
“I’m convinced intraband / outerband resonant absorption by circularly polarized UV photons leads to spin polarization of electrons and, that it’s possible to create an ‘Atomic Quantum Switch’ which carries an electro-static field, electro-magnetic field, and spin orientation,” he said.
“And that can be made to represent non-volatile 0’s and 1’s.”
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.
Thomas is a 30-year pioneer whose projects include a computer with a 3D display, instant response, able to run every available OS and application simultaneously, virtually no power consumption or moving parts and complete security - and whose physical component is about the size of a pack of playing cards.
Also See:
spintronics - Spintronics, May 6, 2004
instant response - Every file you ever owned on 1 disc, February 25, 2004
February 16th, 2006 at 12:28 am
Only two thoughts.
I’m guessing when they say good bye to backups it’s because you don’t have to offload data to make space. Redundancy would still be needed.
I probably can’t imagine a petabyte of data…but I’m sure I can use up the space.
February 16th, 2006 at 12:48 am
I enjoy reading about Micheal’s ideas. I hope that companies don’t meet his newest technologies as “unnecessary” like IBM did with his removable storage device in the 70’s (if I recall correctly).
Good luck…and I’m ready for this tech now!
February 16th, 2006 at 1:22 am
i know where my 750 will go in 4yrs
now im(fixing 2 hopefully) get another terabyte hd
February 16th, 2006 at 7:16 am
I’m sure the MPAA will be trotting out Jack Valenti to feign shock and horror at the prospect of this technology that only theives, pirates, and pornographers would find useful because it affords space for “every film ever made.” It will certainly be the downfall of Hollywood, the recording industry, the magnetic tape industry, the optical drive industry, popcorn farmers, popsicle manufacturers, and plumbers. It will also ruin Christmas for everyone. Congress should begin work on Petabyte Flag legislation now.
Wow! I can’t wait for one!
–TG
February 16th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
I’m still waiting for this type of system to come on to the market. I’m guessing right about the time Holographic Storage (with* free copy of Duke Nukem Forever) is released, this one will be as well.
* i.e. never.
February 16th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
His “physical component”, huh?
February 16th, 2006 at 5:42 pm
It will not eliminate the need for data compression, how do you transfer an uncompressed file over the internet without taking a week?
Pretty cool though, IF its true
February 16th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
can’t imagine a petabyte? that’s like 5 year’s worth of porn downloads for some people.
February 16th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
The version of Windows concurrently available will consume 40% of it, just like now. ;op
February 17th, 2006 at 1:22 am
“To put that into perspective, mega is 1,024 times kilo, giga is 1,024 times mega, tera is 1,024 times giga and peta is 1,024 times tera.”
Eh, NO. Get the units right. Mega is 1,000 times kilo, giga is 1,000 times mega, tera is 1,000 times giga and peta is 1,000 times tera.
Mebi is 1,024 times kibi, gibi is 1,024 times mebi, tebi is 1,024 times gibi and pebi is 1,024 times tebi.
That said, storgage is measured in 1000, not 1024.
February 17th, 2006 at 1:47 am
Use high speed routers and fiber optic cable.
IPv4 land speed record is currently at 1485 gigabytes of data across 30,000 kilometers of network over 30 minutes at an average rate of 7.21 gigabits per second.
So that’s a dual layer DVD in 1.1 seconds - pretty fast.
February 17th, 2006 at 2:06 am
Hmm, in 4 years I’ve rougly downloaded around 4-6 terabytes. But only have 600gb of data on my HDD currently, considering I’ve deleted so many things to save space. Hopefully damn ISPs will provide better download and upload rates than 200kb/s and 80kb/s. 0.x
February 17th, 2006 at 3:55 am
Correction: That’s a dual layer DVD in about 9 seconds — 1.1 * 8.
February 17th, 2006 at 3:56 am
Bzzt.. Wrong Answer… Storage IS measured in units of 1024
February 17th, 2006 at 4:16 am
For managers 1 Meg = 1000 * 1000. Since THEY buy the storage, they have it their way BUT when you manipulate the real thing, there is no such thing in 1000 byte blocks on operating systems I know…
February 17th, 2006 at 4:25 am
your both right
1024 is the correct method of deciding the size of a file
1000 is used by most manfacturers for caculating the size of storage
thats why a 250gb advertised harddrive is usually 230gbs or a 1gb flash drive is closer to 900mbs
February 17th, 2006 at 4:34 am
So if I drop my spintronic I get to lose all my files at once! No backups! Great idea!!!1!
February 17th, 2006 at 4:52 am
Because manufactures count on stupid people like you to trust them.
February 17th, 2006 at 5:45 am
I definently think 1.2Pbytes of storage is necessary. Currently we’ve started shooting movies in uncompressed HD (100megabits/second). The resolution of that is about 1.1 megapixels (w/out calculating). 35mm films scannable resolution is ~12-16 megapixels. When we can have uncompressed 35mm quality movies on our hard drives, or better yet, large format quality movies on our hard drives, then we’ll be set. We already have the sensors that can do like 39 megapixels! All we need is the storage technology for it. Imagine being able to to to…sigh. There’s so much potential here. I’m thinking 1.2 petabytes just isn’t enough. I want my porn in the best quality.
February 17th, 2006 at 7:26 am
1024 GB = 1 TB
1024 TB = 1 EXA BYTE not Peta Bye.
February 17th, 2006 at 7:49 am
“Thomas is a 30-year pioneer whose projects include a computer with a 3D display, instant response, able to run every available OS and application simultaneously, virtually no power consumption or moving parts and complete security - and whose physical component is about the size of a pack of playing cards.”
Sure, it’s hard enough to believe you on a regular basis, but you could try to make your lies more convincing…
February 17th, 2006 at 7:52 am
from Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte)
gigabyte (GB) : 10^9
terabyte (TB) : 10^12
petabye (PB) : 10^15
exabyte (EB) : 10^18
February 17th, 2006 at 8:59 am
But seriously, that’s so fucking fast that it doesn’t really matter compared to the 70 seconds it takes Windows to load on my box.
February 17th, 2006 at 9:02 am
You should have added:
Signed,
Michael’s Mom
(Everyone move along, please. This guy is a total phony.)
February 17th, 2006 at 10:08 am
Marketing counts in the true “kilobit” unit of 1024 so that capacity seems larger.
February 17th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
No, actually the first poster is right — mega, giga, etc are metric decimal units, while mebi, gibi, etc are binary units.
This is however less than 10 years old ; even universities still teach their computer science students that 1 kB = 1024 B…
Same thing applies to the b/B notation… Until recently, there was no difference, bits and bytes shared the same symbol, a lowercase b…
Of course, that’s just being nitpicky.
February 17th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
>Marketing counts in the true “kilobit” unit of 1024 so that capacity seems larger.
Uh, no, but marketing does write such meaningless “mumbo jumbo
sentences.
February 17th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
You - back to that hole you call slashdot. NOW!
February 17th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
imagine defragging a hard drive that big
February 17th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
WHO CARES!!.
The importance of this article is the possible breathru in storage technology.
Stop worrying about semantics.
February 17th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Don’t be dumb. Of course it matters purely because measurements have to be right. There is no point in talking about large HD sizes when we don’t know what the actual figure is.
Dick.
February 17th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
The measurements don’t “have to be right” for this article to still be annoying. You’re going to just as willingly pay +ACQ-750 for a 1,000,000 GB drive as a 700,000 GB drive.
–Michael
February 17th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
Looks like a hoax to me as well. I remember seeing an issue of Wired a number of years back that had somebody in a bunnysuit holding a test tube up with the caption that “This test tube holds over 2^52 bits of information…”
Blah blah blah. Bunch of bullshit until I can buy one on Newegg.com
In any case, I am working on a real project that will generate 2 terabytes per day, every day for a planned mission life of 5 years, but will more likely be 10+ years. We have to save ALL of that data.
Moore’s law had better get its act together, as it sure seems to be slowing down!
February 17th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
Wow, people sure are getting testy over this meaurement issue. I think that the point is that the new technology will allow for SIGNIFICANTLY more storage.
February 17th, 2006 at 5:11 pm
I hope you don’t really think there are terabyte hdd’s (yes it’s not hd, that high-def).
They have terabyte raids, but hdd’s only go up to 500 gigabytes now.
And as far as the storage being needed, it’s not for home use yet, but there are many places where it would be a godsend. And I do know people who have close to 20 terabytes in HD movies. /end rant
February 17th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
You’ve all missed the biggest flaw in the article - it’s not a million times the largest drive - it’s 1024.
February 17th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
No, universities teach that there are two methods of measuring units depending on whether your talking about memory locations, or storage/networking, and on our exams we were given on every question what to use as the measurement for kilo, mega, etc.
A bunch of people can’t come up with some new cutesy units called “mebi”, etc and expect everyone to change their conventions and 40 years of documents. It just doesn’t work that way, and the average consumer needed 10 years to even understand what mega, giga meant for base 2. They’ll need 10 more years to learn a new set of units.
When you buy a disk, it’s in base 10, but when the operating system lists it’s space, it’s in base 2 (by the way, the operating system DOESN’T say mebi, I’m sorry).
So for small amounts of data, the discrepency doesn’t make much of a difference, but 2^30 for giga is a 73741824 byte discrepency over 10^9, and causes many people to think their disk size was misquoted. Marketing is actually abusing the system, because they SHOULD be using base 2, since we’re talking about storage, not networking.
February 17th, 2006 at 6:29 pm
That’s a waste of resources, and many lan cards compress anyway. Thinking like that will cause our IPv6 space to be used up in a few years, because everyone will have 50 ip addresses for every stupid little thing they have in the house, and their dogs will have one too, and need to connect to hong kong for “bark music”.
February 17th, 2006 at 7:20 pm
Regardless of memory capacity, processing speed, whatever– never, but NEVER leave any important work not “backed up.” All very well, to say that this magical “dual disk” of c. 2010 - 2012 could contain everything you’ve created, everything from other sources you may need or want… but when the disk fails –polluted by a virus, overwritten in error, confiscated by some Government agency fishing for incriminating correspondence from 20-years ago– you had better have an alternate source to resurrect critical files.
This is such elementary common-sense that it is not even a “technical” problem. What I do now is post encrypted or plain-text E-mails to myself, occasionally through multiple servers. This data is about as “backed up” as possible… nothing that affects my personal machine, or anything beyond a nuclear-generated Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) that takes down Western Civilization, can prevent my restoring files by simply accessing certain addresses stored by default in standard commercial data clearing-houses.
Actually, even after twenty years of desktop PCs, we remain very much in the Stanley Steamer phase of cybernetics. Only around 2030 will a typical, small, interactive Desktop (pocket-model?) achieve the capacity of an adult human brain. Then your “invisible friend” may expand horizons, before linking to a nanotech dust of others, an emergent-order super-sentience who laughs at carbon-based organisms such as yourself. Hah! You think these last fifty years have seen some changes?– Henry Higgins, you just wait.
PS: I would much prefer NOT to remain anonymous. But now, having spotted the obscure little box available for log-ins, if I try doing so, this powerful communique will undoubtedly be lost. Sigh… name’s Pyrthroes, a Small Dragon from the New Citadel of Llannferyn, if anyone cares.
February 17th, 2006 at 8:03 pm
Not me. I wouldn’t pay a penny more than $600 for a lousy 700k GB drive
February 17th, 2006 at 8:32 pm
“PS: I would much prefer NOT to remain anonymous. But now, having spotted the obscure little box available for log-ins, if I try doing so, this powerful communique will undoubtedly be lost. Sigh… name’s Pyrthroes, a Small Dragon from the New Citadel of Llannferyn, if anyone cares.”
ever heard of copy/paste?
and the never need to back up quote stuck out to me too.
February 18th, 2006 at 1:59 am
Call me back when the 25 Yottabyte HD hits the stores
February 18th, 2006 at 2:29 am
I had a terre byte me once
I never let her do that again !!! =^:^=
February 18th, 2006 at 8:58 am
Faradays laws have nothing to do with storage lol. He doesn’t realize that the reason you need so many molecules to make up a bit is due to detection. If he really wanted to detect the individual molecule spin charges, he’d have to have one hell of a machine. You don’t see hand held molecular detection machines made to the general public do you?
February 18th, 2006 at 9:55 am
24 byte header?
February 18th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
For 750 $ that would roughly be 430 pounds, for a 500 GB Seagate hard drive you have to pay 230 pound, so with 2 of them I would have 1 TB and paid 460 pounds but with one of these I would have 700 TB abd gace spent 30 pound less, hopefully it will come out in the future
There must be new technology coming soon from the companies that are making hard drives, maybe they will come with a solution faster 
February 18th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
what would be the cheapest hard drive to get for our selves now?
i am thinking of buying one but dont want to spend over the limit just to have a fresh hard drive. i like externals since you dont really lose your data just internal could be good too. i already lost 300 gb of music that was collected over many years due to some whack maxtor disc
February 18th, 2006 at 7:40 pm
umm…your the one that’s wrong dumb ass.
February 18th, 2006 at 8:36 pm
February 18th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Noob !!
February 20th, 2006 at 8:11 am
So what happens when the disc fails at the end of it’s life?
February 20th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
well, it seems some people still do not understand the bits, bytes basic measurement which come from base 2. then 2 powers x.
2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024
1024 comes from 2 power 10!!! It is the exact and correct one!
People should realise this by looking at their RAM size.
February 20th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
lolo
February 20th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Now… if only they could figure out a way to make this work, and if it would make the transfer speed faster… and make computers run faster.
February 20th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
could you imagine a hard drive crash with that much data to be lost?
February 23rd, 2006 at 5:28 pm
If this guy was such a hotshot, why hasn’t he gotten someone to take a decent picture of him? I mean, just because you throw on some glasses and sit in front of a whiteboard with a bunch of crap written on it doesn’t make you some genius inventor.
Kinda hard to take people like this seriously, unless their work shows up in scientific journals.
February 23rd, 2006 at 10:38 pm
Not good enough I want a 5000 Petabyte Hard drive so atleast then i can go and down load my brain onto it, when the matrix quantom computer comes out.
February 24th, 2006 at 10:02 am
Does anyone realise that this is as good as an April Fool’s joke?
February 26th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
It would be awsume to see them come on the market.
February 28th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
the fuck outta here.
impossible kid.
Don` screw around.
June 28th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
1024 EB = ?
June 28th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
does BB exist ?
BRONTOBYTE
December 11th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
1MB=1024KB
1GB=1024MB
1TB=1024GB
1PB=1024TB (peta)
1EB=1024PB (exa)
1ZB=1024EB (Zetta or Hepa)
1YB=1024ZB (Yotta or Otta)
1NB=1024YB (Nea)
1DB=1024NB (Dea)
1UB=1024DB (Una)
I’ve had a spreadsheet on number names for years.
I think all the information in the world (we now generate 2-4TB a year) would fit on a 1PB drive.
WolverineLV