Welles

Breakthrough Nanotechnology Will Bring 100 Terabyte 3.5-inch Digital Data Storage Disks?


http://www.physorg.com/news785.html

Blinky2004

Holy crap!
That's looks like some cool new technology.
I would imagine that single 3.5" disc will cost an arm & a leg though huh? [stuned]

My buddy upstairs will like this info thanks Welles. [righton]

Welles

Farther down the article the estimated disc drive will be $570-$750 with replacement discs running about $45. This is mind boggling stuff! [confused]

Blinky2004

That's it?! $45?!
The price of the drive itself is what CDRW used to cost a couple years ago. That's not bad at all! Excellent, can't wait! [righton]

The Coach

Don't forget that nano technology is a whole new area in science and it can take quite a while (my guess is >20 years) before we see some useful products. At least that's the impression get when I read other science articles.

Welles

JoeD,

You're right not to get too excited but I've read the entire web site of the Colossal Corp. and while there are no specific timelines offered, I'd say this proposal is more than theoretical and distinctly not vaporware. (I've been around quite a few Silicon Valley vaporware projects and engineers.) It is, however, at the stage of gaining capitalization for development and requires further research so there won't be a product produced next year. I wouldn't be surprised if there was in five years, though.

Only time will tell (and other cheap clich?s).

The Coach

I don't think that the competition is sitting still either, because a 10,000 to 100,000 Gigabyte disk drive (!) (even a after 5 years) would mean that probably all hard drive manufacturer would be out of business.
Even if they never develop it into a final product, it sure does keep the competition on their toes!

Hard drive size doesn't matter too much to me right now (what am I going to do with 250GB?!)
No reliability is more important to me; I have three 5300rpm drives running in my server on top of each other and I never had any problem with them in 4 years. During that same time I already lost two 7200rpm drives...

Sandy

IBM has invented a storage method that uses nanotec some time ago [I don?t know if you're talking about this one],
and will not take so long to release it...
I read about it in the newspaper more than one time, first presenting it as a research, and then as "pre-release", upcoming product...
This technology uses microscopic needles or pins that "mark" or make a hole in a polymer to mark binary information [0 or 1, hole or no hole].
It was said that the capacity was like, 1Tb for each square cm...
The great advantage of this new tech is that it saves A LOT of energy, because you don?t have to keep it spinning like disk storage.
Cheers guys...

Welles

Tak,

Thanks for that tip. I'll keep an eye open for information on the IBM system you mention. The particular system which stimulated this thread is an optical disc.

Cheers!
Welles