In an almost indiscernible and confusing article filled with various scientific terms that most cringe to hear, it was described how in October of 2008 scientists successfully stored and retrieved data on the nucleus of an atom-- and all for two short lived seconds. With this new type of storage, a traditional bit can now be both zero and one at the same time, but in order to understand just how this is possible, translate the article linked above to plain English. Data integrity returns after two seconds at 90% and storage is obviously impermanent, so there are many kinks to work out before atomic storage actually serves a purpose, but give these scientists a couple of decades, and it's theoretical that we'll one day have nuclear drives the size of USB drives today (or MicroSD cards, or why not even specs of dust?) that can hold hundreds of terabytes-- even pentabytes-- of information.
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Member since:2005-11-09
If we were talking about atoms in isolation, then you would be correct. We are, however talking about atoms in a collection that is considered a "Storage Device".
Considering the need to supply an equal amount of energy to every atom which has data written to it, then as you store more and more information, more and more atoms being employed to lower energy levels used to ensure certainty of data would be a benefit.
Perhaps, what we will end up with is a system where it is assumed a full drive of data, with a 99.9999% certainty level of stored data, they then decide how much energy they want to peak at and extrapolate how many atoms clusters it will take to achieve that. They can then, begin to store information at lower energy levels with high specific energy on the electrons in the atoms, until they hit a break even point at the device begins writing redundant data to the rest of the cluster to maintain that break even point so as to not pull any more energy from the energy source.
Member since:
2007-04-06
Well, not necessarily. That would depend on the relation of energy to certainty. It might be more 'efficient' to just use one atom with high energy than a whole bunch with very low levels.
Edit: typo
Edited 2008-12-10 05:54 UTC