Researchers Use Table Salt To Increase Hard Drive Density Six-Fold

[Brink]

Think the 4TB hard drives hitting the market now are impressive? You’re right. But one group of researchers say that’s nothing compared to the storage capacities that could be unlocked using a new technique they’ve discovered. Dr Joel Yang and his team from the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering in Singapore claim that simply by adding table salt to an existing lithographic process, they have come up with a way of increasing the information density of HDDs six-fold. Basically, 6TB of info could fit onto today's 1TB platters.

Read more at:
Maximum PC | Researchers Use Table Salt To Increase Hard Drive Density Six-Fold

 

[Corazon]

Whoah!

 

[Layback Bear]

If this will be marketed I can see Cloud storage taking a big hit.

 

[Corazon]

What happens when you add salt to clouds? It rains, doesn't it?

:roflmao:

 

[Bearcatrp]

Don't think they will sell it to consumers. They will price it out of consumers reach so they can stream everything to us. The cloud would take a big hit if we would get these.

 

[Darkelk]

Holy crap that sounds brilliant. For people who can pay what they want for it..

 

[Zepher]

Don't think they will sell it to consumers. They will price it out of consumers reach so they can stream everything to us. The cloud would take a big hit if we would get these.

The cloud is designed so you can access your data where ever you have internet access, what does having 17TB of storage at my home do for me when I am away from it? it's not easily accessed and if the machine crashes or loses power then I have no access at all to my data. (same can happen to the Cloud, but they have techs working to get it up asap, I'd have to physically go home and see what happened.)

Most people I know can't even fill up a 500GB hard drive.

 

[Bertison]

Did anyone read this part? -

<However, the number is a bit deceiving; while 3.3 terabit/sq. in. disks have been fabricated, the crew has “only” demonstrated data-storage capabilities in disks with 1.9 terabits/sq. in.>

What (exactly) will that mean?

 

[Corazon]

Means that they've made platters theoretically capable of holding 6TB each, but have only managed to actually write to and read from platters holding a little less than 4TB. So far.

 

[lhorwinkle]

Summary:
They're working on bigger drives.
But they've been doing that for 50 years.
So, how is this news?

 

[mickey megabyte]

Did anyone read this part? -

<However, the number is a bit deceiving; while 3.3 terabit/sq. in. disks have been fabricated, the crew has “only” demonstrated data-storage capabilities in disks with 1.9 terabits/sq. in.>

What (exactly) will that mean?

it means that you have to take the article with a pinch of salt.

(like most modern 'journalism')

 

[Corazon]

take the article with a pinch of salt

:roflmao:

 

[strollin]

That's all well and good but I'm waiting for the breakthrough that makes it so we have SSDs that rival HDDs in capacity and cost. An improvement in HDD technology like this may actually hinder that advancement.

 

[Corazon]

Not very likely. The key difference between HDs and SSDs isn't their storage capacity, but their transfer rate and most of all access time.

You could put a 100-exabyte drive into your machine and it would still boot as slowly (maybe not quite as slowly) as a 500GB one.

 

[strollin]

The key difference between SSDs and HDDs is their cost per gigabyte of storage. Today, since the cost per gig for SSDs is prohibitively high they are mainly relegated to boot drives. However, in the near future, as the cost per gigabyte of SSDs drops, the HDD will go the way of the floppy disk drive.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi all
We already have small 2TB drives -- 4TB shouldn't be too far away

You should look at pictures of old circa 1974 IBM mainframe 2314 Disc drives -- these were HUGE and only had I think it was around 29 MB (yes MB) capacity.

Moore's Law still has a LONG way to go yet before we run out of storage capacity.

Incidentally I never did see the point of CLOUD backup -- running APPLICATIONS however is a different issue.

For those interested here's a snippet from old IBM archives on the 2314. Note that for it's time it was a really brand new technology and some of the ideas such as incorporating independent disk controllers so I/O could take placer CONCURRENTLY with SYSTEM PROCESSING instead of having to wait for I/O to complete before continuing execution was the foundation for I/O handling in modern OS'es such as Windows and Linux.

IBM Archives: IBM 2314 direct access storage facility

cheers
jimbo

 

[discript]

interesting, hope it gets big, i could be doing with some 12TB storage on my new rig im building, im using a 500GB SSD for system, and il tell you, its soooo expensive!

discript

 

[wilywombat]

Bring back the old 360K 5.5" Floppy I would say!!!

 

[Corazon]

Yeah. 360K floppies for the OS and maybe two 1.44MB HD 3.5" floppies in RAID for storage. LOL!