Figure 3 is absolutely spectacular, and deserves to be admired by the whole world.
A comment on the inevitable promises of revolutionized data storage: Yes the areal density is fantastically high (>500Tbit / square inch as opposed to 1Tbit/in^2 in bleeding edge HDDs / NAND flash). But it requires ultrahigh vacuum, preparation of a clean copper crystal, dosing with copper chloride and then writing/reading with a scanning tunneling microscope, maintaining liquid nitrogen temperature.
Also a modern SSD will write about 500MB in a second, while this method would write 500MB in 240 years.
I don't mean to slag it off; we should all appreciate it for being an absolutely wonderful and awe inspiring technical feat. Just don't get carried away dreaming of the applications in your laptop/server/phone.
[+] [-] CarolineW|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116615 (gizmodo.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116577 (sciencenewsline.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116127 (wsj.com)
Which will win the race for votes?
[+] [-] flashingleds|9 years ago|reply
Figure 3 is absolutely spectacular, and deserves to be admired by the whole world.
A comment on the inevitable promises of revolutionized data storage: Yes the areal density is fantastically high (>500Tbit / square inch as opposed to 1Tbit/in^2 in bleeding edge HDDs / NAND flash). But it requires ultrahigh vacuum, preparation of a clean copper crystal, dosing with copper chloride and then writing/reading with a scanning tunneling microscope, maintaining liquid nitrogen temperature.
Also a modern SSD will write about 500MB in a second, while this method would write 500MB in 240 years.
I don't mean to slag it off; we should all appreciate it for being an absolutely wonderful and awe inspiring technical feat. Just don't get carried away dreaming of the applications in your laptop/server/phone.