Memory Crystals have arrived!

[Super Kami Guru]

A group of scientists from the University of Southampton have developed a a glass disc that will store computer data using a high speed laser to create nanostructures in fused quartz. What makes this even more remarkable is that it in theory it should have a near unlimited life span, capable of surviving and maintaining data in temperatures up to 1000 degrees Celsius and a DVD sized disc will store a massive 360 Terabytes of data, a Blueray can only store 128 Gigabytes.

http://rt.com/news/5d-nanostructured-glass-optical-memory-941/

The article makes reference to the Superman memory crystals, personally my mind jumped straight to Goa'uld and Asgard crystal technology from Stargate and potential for use in space travel. Mainly I'm thinking a lot more in terms of what it means otherwise, once properly develop how much more powerful we'll be able to make computers and what they'll be able to do.

Though I'm no computer or physics expert, so what do people think of the potential of this? What does it mean for our technological development, I'm sure there's people here a lot more expert than myself on these things.

 

[Weaver]

Is the idea it's to be used in place of discs?
As it sounds, anything you write can't be erased, making it impractical for a hard drive replacement (from a privacy standpoint).

It's cool that they can store so much, I'm just not sure we even need something that can store that much. But, if the cost is comparable to current optical discs then hey, may as well use them.

 

[Tom_green_day]

I think 'Crystals' and 'glass discs' are very different things. Surely glass discs are super fragile though? Y'know, being made of... glass?
It'll get rid of the used games/films/music market for sure, I drop my stuff all the time.

 

[Product Placement]

The article makes reference to the Superman memory crystals, personally my mind jumped straight to Goa'uld and Asgard crystal technology from Stargate and potential for use in space travel.

To be fair, the idea that Kryptonians use crystal storage technology predates Stargate.

Here's a Kryptonian "computer" in the original Superman film:

Anyways, regarding the potential of this device, it's first and foremost an efficient way to store data. This is gonna become very valuable in the coming years/decades, now that our society is starting to revolve more and more around loads of data.

Research centers and hospitals will definitely come to adopt this technology. Their line of work is calling for more and more demand for vast storage space for data.

As for personal computers and possibly web servers, it depends. It doesn't mention anything about reading speed, which is important for a device that needs to be fast and responsive. One of the biggest bottlenecks in the efficiency of computers of today is not how much data it can store but rather the speed it takes to fetch and process data stored in the hard drive. A normal 7200rpm disk drive is painfully slow, in terms of modern day computer speeds. From the perspective of the CPU, the difference between fetching data from the RAM and a disk drive is like the difference between walking across the street and going to the moon. Solid State Drives are, at the moment, the best fix for this problem but if it ends up taking longer to read data from these quarts storage disks then it's not a viable solution for personal computers.

Also, it seems like that this technology isn't allowing you to re-write the disks, at the moment. Unless this is fixed it will not be viable for storage that require regular rewrites, like some web servers. But again, it still looks like a good thing for data centers for science facilities & hospitals.

 

[Agayek]

I think 'Crystals' and 'glass discs' are very different things. Surely glass discs are super fragile though? Y'know, being made of... glass?
It'll get rid of the used games/films/music market for sure, I drop my stuff all the time.

Glass is not inherently fragile. The silicate we use, and laymen call 'glass', is only one of dozens of different compounds that fall under the scientific classification of "glass". Since we can't use windows to store data, it's very, very likely that said glass discs use a very different compound than what you're probably thinking of.

That doesn't necessarily mean it will be any less brittle/fragile, but the odds of it are pretty decent.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Oh, awesome, so they'd last past the apocalypse?

Well, assuming the means to read them was still available as well.

 

[Leemaster777]

Oh, awesome, so they'd last past the apocalypse?

Well, assuming the means to read them was still available as well.

I'm suddenly reminded of Fallout: New Vegas.

OT: This is very interesting indeed, but not likely to replace CDs anytime soon... or probably at all. These could most certainly be useful for long-term storage of data, from records to historical documents, but for day-to-day use, CDs would probably still be superior.

And if these things aren't commercially viable, then there likely won't be much funding put into developing them on a large scale.

 

[Echopunk]

How long before we invent the technology to convert human memories into raw data, so that when coupled with an imprint of your genetic code, you can download yourself into a crystal and fire it into space to be discovered by a new civilization thousands of years in the future?

Also, plot potential for a game/novel.

 

[Fijiman]

I think it's pretty awesome. However, I don't see it becoming particularly practical for several years. Though once it's been more or less perfected I can see it being very popular with businesses/companies with large server networks considering that some of those businesses/companies have huge server rooms that resemble the computer rooms of 60 years ago.

 

[Reaper195]

As someone has already said, it sounds like stuff can't be erased from the...crystal...discs...drives...things. But on the other hand, 360 terabytes is a fuck tonne of space. Short of buying every game on Steam and downloading them all, and then also pirating them, and pirating a bunch of other stuff, it'd take me a while to fill one. But on the off chance they were ever made and marketed to the average consumer...how much would they cost? Blu-Ray discs have been out for quite a few years, and they have yet to drop like DVD did five years after it came out.

personally my mind jumped straight to Goa'uld and Asgard crystal technology from Stargate

Same here! Stargate FTW!

 

[Evil Smurf]

I want it. I'm going to get a 960gb SSD and this looks like it will blow it out of the water.

 

[Super Kami Guru]

How long before we invent the technology to convert human memories into raw data, so that when coupled with an imprint of your genetic code, you can download yourself into a crystal and fire it into space to be discovered by a new civilization thousands of years in the future?

Also, plot potential for a game/novel.

Funny you should mention that, there's an article about being able to upload human consciousness in the recommend section of the article

http://rt.com/usa/google-kurzweil-singularity-brain-011/

 

[thesilentman]

Pretty exciting stuff. I wouldn't see this as a replacement for my hard drive, but as a device to record history, I'm excited.

... This also means that if anyone wants to scam me, they better think twice. =P

 

[Dr.Awkward]

Is the idea it's to be used in place of discs?
As it sounds, anything you write can't be erased, making it impractical for a hard drive replacement (from a privacy standpoint).

It's cool that they can store so much, I'm just not sure we even need something that can store that much. But, if the cost is comparable to current optical discs then hey, may as well use them.

Erasing should be pretty simple - You can "garbage up" the selected data by changing the nano-structures into something that isn't recognized or readable by the computer. Even then, the only process on deleting files is that the header on the deleted file gets stripped and the remaining data is marked as empty - A complete erase would be if other files uses the deleted file's space, or if the drive was completely reformatted.

As for the massive amount of space, we actually could use it, mostly for A) server data storage (you've heard of how much data a datacenter can generate in a month, right? We're talking petabytes) and B) advance the storage capability of HDDS, where we can replace the steel platters for these crystal disks.

 

[Weaver]

Is the idea it's to be used in place of discs?
As it sounds, anything you write can't be erased, making it impractical for a hard drive replacement (from a privacy standpoint).

It's cool that they can store so much, I'm just not sure we even need something that can store that much. But, if the cost is comparable to current optical discs then hey, may as well use them.

Erasing should be pretty simple - You can "garbage up" the selected data by changing the nano-structures into something that isn't recognized or readable by the computer. Even then, the only process on deleting files is that the header on the deleted file gets stripped and the remaining data is marked as empty - A complete erase would be if other files uses the deleted file's space, or if the drive was completely reformatted.

As for the massive amount of space, we actually could use it, mostly for A) server data storage (you've heard of how much data a datacenter can generate in a month, right? We're talking petabytes) and B) advance the storage capability of HDDS, where we can replace the steel platters for these crystal disks.

That's a lazy delete, and is window's default, but is not the only way to delete files. There are ways to do proper deletion. I use a program called simply "Eraser" that can perform several algorithmic deletion methods on windows. I'm paranoid. MacOS has a "secure delete" option as well which is similar.

Furthermore, the deletion in this case would essentially consistently shrink your hard drive space. The issue with, say, trying to run a massive data farm off this is if you needed to adjust your system's bin segmentation across your distributed network you would basically need to have all servers make a new copy of their localized database portion and re-write it in a new way. All space the old one took up would now be gone.

Also, temporary data wouldn't really exist. If you needed to write a temp file somewhere, you would have to "delete" it in the method that shrinks your hard drive. I'd imagine most databases would store their variables in memory, but I guess I just don't know.

 

[pyrosaw]

Now I can finally recreate the original Superman movie.

 

[PoolCleaningRobot]

personally my mind jumped straight to Goa'uld and Asgard crystal technology from Stargate and potential for use in space travel

Me too, Stargate data crystals > Superman. Do they have to be disk shaped or can we get them crystal shaped too? Imagine a crystal shaped port next to the usb port on a laptop. Just plug a crystal right into it. It would be awesome!

edit: also, its about time we caught up with storage like this. One of the professors at my school told me he worked at IBM back in the day and they gave him a 4 foot tall computer with an 11 inch floppy disk drive which he said was cool because it could hold a lot of data. About 1 megabyte if I'm not mistaken. Now, space for storing things like documents isn't even something to consider. It would be cool if we could do the same for movies, game, pictures, and programs. Though it wouldn't exactly help those of us with a data hoarding problem...

 

[Boris Goodenough]

Now I can finally recreate the original Superman movie.

You already have General Zod and Kal'El? You have a (green) kryptonite prison?!

 

[CriticalMiss]

360 Terabytes is a lot of space, you could fit half of the cutscenes from a Metal Gear Solid game on that!

We just need them to float and glow and we practically have Final Fantasy style save points. They can restore HP and MP right? I'm assuming they can.