Terabyte nanotech thumb drives around the corner?

Wired has a write-up of a new storage technology developed at Arizona State University that could produce flash thumb drives capable of storing terabytes of data in the near future, that also happens to be cheaper and more energy efficient than flash memory. The new technology has been branded programmable metallization cell, and differs from present storage technologies in that it "creates nanowires from copper atoms the size of a virus to record binary ones and zeros." It all sounds very interesting -- if slightly too optimistic -- to us, and we'll get to find out relatively soon just how effective the new chips are: Arizona State's business arm has licensed the technology to three companies, which may be ready to sell a product containing the chips within 18 months. Watch this space.

[tekdroid @ Oct 27th 2007 11:41PM]

Kozicki says the process is like condensing a crystal from a solution, except that the process is almost infinitely reversible. If the PMC is fed a positive charge, the copper atoms return to their previous free-floating state, and the nanowires disassemble.
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The most promising part of that article to me. People don't realise that flash gets weaker each time it's written to, until it fails - which I've seen enough times.

Now if only we actually saw this in 18 months, which i'm doubting very much. The article has the usuals of "could" do this, could do that, is low cost, is power-efficient, etc... but all we really want to see are products.

Sounds great, tho.

[BananaBoat @ Oct 27th 2007 11:47PM]

From the labs of Dr.Lyingtoyou and destined for store shelves by the year never.


Oh and in before "But can it play doom?"

[Roger Zhang @ Oct 27th 2007 11:57PM]

I want updates on this.

[Bard @ Oct 28th 2007 12:02AM]

Ya know... while there is the worry of vaporware, the projects that ASU does produce aren't known to disappear into thin air. What was once a party school has actually been cranking out a TON of good tech for NASA, and I think that they're on the verge of doing it again.

Call me too optimistic, but I think there's a tinsy-winsy little bit of a spine to this one that will get it to stand on it's own sooner than we think.

[Shibathedog @ Oct 28th 2007 12:11AM]

hopefully, Cheaper AND Better? Where do I sign? (of course its going to cost ridiculous amounts of money anyway because its new >_

[Tiptup300 @ Oct 28th 2007 12:31AM]

Imagine if the tech was cheap, just imagine how fast it would be acquired as normal technology. This wont happen though.

[AndGadget @ Oct 28th 2007 12:35AM]

Excuse me everyone...

I'm first in Engadget and I couldn't find the way deleting my comments.

There's no 'delete' button or link in Engadget and Blogsmith

How do I delete my comments and replies? Help me :(

[Ayle @ Oct 28th 2007 12:50AM]

You can't.... Sorry...

[scott @ Oct 28th 2007 2:32AM]

Just try to not reference your mistress on a tech site when you have a nerdy wife next time...

[scott @ Oct 28th 2007 2:32AM]

Just try to not reference your mistress on a tech site when you have a nerdy wife next time...

[AndGadget @ Oct 28th 2007 3:59AM]

Scott, What the hell are you talking about

[Kyle Simmons @ Oct 28th 2007 12:41AM]

I want more details... the article is rather lackluster. Could be very cool technology. Sounds iffy, but I guess I'm trying to apply my electrical engineering background to a rather chemical process...

[Sam Zebian @ Oct 28th 2007 12:48AM]

sounds cool, I wonder if they will finally be able to have affordable SSD's that can match or even be higher in capacity than Hard drives, then we will be able to use this technology in Laptops, desktops, Portable media players and much much more. If this doesn't have the problem normal flash does in memory problems after about 10 years, then this technology may be the perfect answer to all of our storage problems!!!

[Fred @ Oct 28th 2007 1:05AM]

When talking about your product in a computer field it't not always considered positive to compare it to a virus.

[Dan @ Oct 28th 2007 1:06AM]

huh. and i though everyone at ASU was an illiterate date-rapist.

[jimmyb @ Oct 28th 2007 2:17AM]

it's always good to accuse someone of being illiterate whilst including spelling errors in your post :)

[Dan @ Oct 29th 2007 1:01AM]

Fuck you.

[Zzephyr @ Oct 29th 2007 2:20AM]

Well, you spelled that right.

[wakka_wakka @ Oct 28th 2007 1:29AM]

:O

flippin sweet!

[JohnTitor @ Oct 28th 2007 2:29AM]

ʎllɐʇoʇ uıddılɟ

[Dan Parmelee @ Oct 28th 2007 2:34AM]

I think "around the corner" is a bit of a stretch. It may be sooner than we think, but the title of this page makes it seem like Best Buy will stock a Cruzer Micro 1000GB on Monday morning.

Oh and Univ of AZ > Arizona State. :-)

[ManekiNeko @ Oct 28th 2007 5:35AM]

It'll come sooner than later, don't worry about that. I remember a time when a four gigabyte flash drive cost $700... and that time was only four years ago!

[Twitchy @ Oct 28th 2007 7:30AM]

Don't get too excited - just before they are ready to go into production some greedy twat will file a patent on a 'thumb-sized device utilising copper fillaments for large memory storage" and sue this innovation into the history books.

[strider_mt2k @ Oct 28th 2007 9:13AM]

This might do even more for Portable Applications.

Not only could you carry a suite of apps with you, but you could carry your entire media library as well!

I do that to a very small degree with my 4GB Sandisk Cruzer Micro.
I use VLC portable and rotate a few GB worth of media on it to keep things entertaining at work.

www.portableapps.com has a ton of info on running portable applications and even offers a suite of apps with a launcher as well.


Oh yeah. I guess you could do other stuff with these huge drives too. :p

[chreeestopher @ Oct 28th 2007 4:54PM]

yeah i heard about those 4 gb things too! new tech is great huh? but theres also a totally more 21st century way to store music. its called an ipod. you should check it out sometime when your 56k connection isn't laggy.

[Dave @ Oct 28th 2007 10:50AM]

Holy Shnikeys!!!!! Bring on the Terabyte iPhone/iPod/Zune/umpc!!!!! I would LOVE to have all my data in my pocket! (but then again, who wouldn't?)

[Gerlinger, A @ Oct 28th 2007 11:17AM]

EMC, NetApp and a ton of other storage companies must be crapping their pants over this. This type of tech could dismantle the storage industry overnight.

[Tracy in Cary @ Oct 29th 2007 10:35AM]

I disagree. EMC and NetApp make their money off managing the storage and high availability. They just buy hard drives from disk manufacturers like Seagate, WD, Quantum. If anybody has something to fear, it's the disk companies like these.

Also keep in mind the companies buying EMC like "proven" reliable technology. So even if this technology was on the shelves next month, it's unlikely major companies would buy a SAN made out of them until 2009 at the earliest.

[shmengie @ Oct 28th 2007 11:23AM]

is that a terabyte of data in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

[steve @ Oct 28th 2007 12:34PM]

i could go for a terabyte mp3 player
i think that would make a nice upgrade for the meager 8gb i have in my e280

[N30 G30 @ Oct 28th 2007 5:03PM]

that's around 200,000 songs. lol.

You'd have to put songs on your new MP3 player even if you don't like the song just to fill it up.

[Iggy @ Oct 28th 2007 5:11PM]

If this technology comes to pass, it could well be the end of hard drives.

[EERac @ Oct 28th 2007 6:33PM]

I'm worried my last comment was flagged as spam because I referenced this post I just wrote explaining a key challenge any proposed nanoscale memory faces. Hopefully this one will appear.

The thing to remember about this kind of stuff is simply having a way to store bits isn't enough to make an actual memory. You also need a way to control the storage technology.

To demonstrate their copper-based storage technology, researchers placed a nanoscale device between two much larger electrodes. They showed that it could reliably store data, by using the electrodes to read and write to the device. To build an actually memory, however, one would need a way to control billions of these devices. The large electrodes would need to be replaced by an additional nanoscale technology

One approach would be to create a grid of nanoscale, and place the devices between each pair of perpendicular nanoscale wires. As luck would have it, such grids of tightly packed nanowires have already been produced. Unfortunately, no one has demonstrated a way of efficiently controlling the individual nanowires that make up the grid. Until we have a way of individually controlling nanoscale wires, we can't take advantage of nanoscale storage technology.

[eerac @ Oct 28th 2007 6:36PM]

Hmm, guess the link isn't going to appear, but if you're interested just google my name or perhaps "overheard in providence"