Breakthrough in ferroelectric materials could enable million-GB thumbdrives
By Evan Blass 
posted May 9th 2006 10:49AM
posted May 9th 2006 10:49AM
While we have to agree with certain Engadget readers who feel that 640KB of RAM is plenty for most computing tasks, those darn scientists just keep looking for ways to stuff more and more data into smaller spaces. The latest breakthrough on the storage tip comes courtesy of researchers from Drexel and Penn, who have found a way to stabilize the simple physical property of ferroelectricity at the nano scale, making possible such obviously unnecessary densities as 12,800,000GB per cubic centimeter. Ferroelectric materials are usable as memory because they possess the ability to switch electric charges in so-called dipole moments, but before Drexel's Dr. Jonathan Spanier and colleagues decided to embed the materials in water, it had previously been impossible to screen those dipole moments at scales small enough to be useful. Don't expect to be able to buy a zillion gig, water-filled iPod anytime soon, though, as the research team still faces significant hurdles in actually assembling the nanowires that would make up such a drive with the proper density as well as developing a method of efficiently reading and writing data.
my god....thats all I can really think to say is my god....
hope that's enough for my porn! :D
No offense Engadget, but has it ever occured to you that Billy Boy might have said he reads Engadget out of ~courtesy~ in that darn interview, and maybe the reality of the situation is that he had opened this website only once in his life?
Thats amazing.. Hope soon this will be in the market..
I think that can store the whole internet in itself.
Yet the biggest step towards a full flash computer !
"but Blue-Ray can hold 200 GB per disc"
roles eyes, laughs and walks out of the room
Drexel? WE R, PENN STATE!!! LOL
I guess now i can start my research on molecular brain scanning for duplication of sentient conciseness via nano molecular stacking....
in emulation!
Can't wait for my 10PB hard drive!
That Xplane flight simulator is 60GB in size.
Joe:
You mean backing up your brain?
DM, courtesy for whom?
The interview was not with Engadget, it was with another site.
All of these nanomaterial announcements piss me off. They all are announcing capabilities based off of ideal conditions. They also always make significant assumptions on their ability to actually apply the properties of these nanomaterials. Point in case: The Space Elevator made from carbon nanotubes(http://arxiv.org/ftp/cond-mat/papers/0601/0601668.pdf).
Nanomaterials offer great promise, and I guess announcements like these help to encourage investment, but it is always a disappointment when you realize how far off we really are from these projections.
heres an idea: instead of one 12,800,000gig drive, split it into 12,800 drives of 1TB each in RAID-0 configuration .
is it possible to break the sound barrier with data?? ;)
#12
Electrical signals already travel near the speed of light.
yep you heard it first from me....
now fund me.
zoara, Im pretty sure it was with Engadget...
Check it out for yourself-
http://www.engadget.com/2005/05/02/the-engadget-interview-bill-gates-part-1/
http://www.engadget.com/2005/05/03/the-engadget-interview-bill-gates-part-2/
doesnt help if the read/write isnt 10 gig/second, sure youll never fill it up cause youll be dead by the time all your data gets transferred...
He was my materials engineering professor last year.
Yes #7, we are PENN STATE. We should make the trip down to philly and beat those nerds up
Dudes, that's like Star Trek Voyager computer storage.
Yes please come to Drexel and try to beat us smart people up. It makes me proud to go to a school that makes the news for making advancements in technology.
#18- I remember in Voyager they were talking in Terrabytes, so thats way beyond Voyager storage.
When and if this comes out, we'll probably be paying about a $1 per GB. Time to go buy lottery tickets!!!
-Boots his hard drive out the window
#18, in 'Voyager didn't they store data in bags of goopy liquid that got a nano-virus or something once?
Yet another thing Gene Roddenberry predicted?
i go to drexel :) but this place is to expensive >:[
ooooo
i would love to have that in an mp3 player, computer ram, and a all flashh hard drive
even if all of that space is unnecesary
i could get more stuff to fill it with
If this technology is not the expensive (like, maybe a few hundred or thousand bucks for one of those things, less for smaler capacity) then it would kill flash (to some extent), had drives, HD and Blu-ray DVDs, and tape storage. You could store a HD movie of your entire life on one of those things! Now if only someone could come up with a CPU that would be equivalent in gain over the previous best.
Reminds me of The Final Cut with Robin Williams .
well i'll leave the clock running. Let's run an experiment. How long does it take for the idiots at Penn State to realize that engadget meant the University of Pennsylvania? You actually thought that Penn State has the ability to do something other than down beast and watch nittany lions run around a field?
I think not
Damn you skank! I wanted to laugh at that poor lil hick first!
And Andy, get back to work. Eric said he doesnt want to have to repair your f'd up soldering n e more.
Oh and congrats dude!
#21 josh, I hope you meant $1 per GB in flash memory because hdd's are already down to almost 25 cents a gig.
And yea I to remeber some star trek episode where they mentioned their computers were basicly a fluid organic type of storage.
Clarifacation: dipole moment isnt actually a moment in time, dipole moment is a measure of the polarity of a particle at a given time. The word moment comes from the same word as momentum. Ferroelectric materials don't switch during a "dipole moment," rather they can change their dipole moment readily.
Wow, wasn't expecting all the Drexel folks in the comments. Go Drexel!
My 1st words upon reading this "Holy S&*t"
ummm
some one help me
im i seeing things
like 12.5 million GB
help
im going crazy
This cannot be true. At least not for the next 5 years or so. And imagine how much that would cost, if a 64GB USB drive is now about $5,000.
cover it with gold and diamonds and some rich moron is bound to buy it
Colossal Storage patented ferroelectric holographic storage in 2000. They predicted > 40,000,000 Terabits cu. cm. in 1998 using a 5 nm "atomic switch". Drexel an
Penn, Harvard only moved the particle size down a little and still dont understand the physics needed.
http://www.colossalstorage.net
suppose they put this in a ~1" SD card... could i store every piece of data in existence? what if i have 2 hard drives?