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Data Storage

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Alan
 Alan
(@alan)
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Joined: 20 years ago
Posts: 53
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I thought this was an interesting read on Data Storage in the future!

http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6287126.stm

Alan


   
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(@trewmte)
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Joined: 19 years ago
Posts: 1877
 

Interesting out look and I vaguely remember something back in the 90s about messages being hidden in chemicals. I did feel though my thoughts when rerading the article being drawn towards The Matrix. Which may be unfair on this guy's ideas….

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But we can envisage building data storage devices that use individual atoms to represent one bit of information.

Consider a carbon crystal, created (and edited) one atom at a time by nanomachinery; there are two stable isotopes of carbon, and we can use a Carbon-12 atom to represent a binary 0 and a Carbon-13 atom to represent a binary 1.

ONE PETABYTE EQUALS
1024 terabytes
1,048,576 gigabytes
1,073,741,824 megabytes

One gram of this substance could store 10 to the power 21 bytes (887,808 petabytes) - the equivalent storage of more than 11 billion typical PCs.

By way of comparison, in 2003 we as a species recorded 2,200 petabytes (2.5 x 10 to the power 18 bytes) of data - enough to fill the hard drives of more than 28m typical PCs.

If we can figure out how to read and write data on the atomic scale, you could store the sum total of all the data we recorded in 2003 on a grain of sand.


   
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steve862
(@steve862)
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Joined: 19 years ago
Posts: 194
 

If we can figure out how to read and write data on the atomic scale, you could store the sum total of all the data we recorded in 2003 on a grain of sand.

I look forward to us briefing search teams to look for spare 'hard drives' of this size. I hope I don't one day find myself struggling to image a spec of dust, thinking is it dust or does it have a HPA?

A very interesting article. I guess with technology having moved on so much we have to believe that this technology will one day be possible on a commercial scale.

Steve


   
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