Hardware Hard disk capacity can sextuple with ‘pinch of salt’

Singapore researchers have found a way to increase hard disk capacities six-fold by using sodium chloride, aka table salt.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/10/20/hard-disk-capacity-can-sextuple-with-pinch/1

 

"have more storage than you could possibly need?"

My experience is that the more storage you put in, the rate you download increases exponentially....mostly with crap you would never have been bothered about had you not got the space available.

Ever increasing broadband speeds doesnt help either....

I've managed to nearly fill a 1.5TB drive in just over 9mths, when previoulsy, a lowly 500gb lasted nearly 2yrs..

 

I hope you've done that legally, and you're not setting yourself up for a dawn raid from the copyright police...

 

Will need new chips be made available to support this?

 

<oops>glad I didn't point out the incomplete quote with my last, would have been even more embarrassing

 

Another -often overlooked- reason is because the data itself has changed as well. Especially video material: it's all much better quality, and thus much bigger files. Simply because it more feasible with bigger consumer hard drives.

 

I'm sure Hustler is talking about all those Steam games + backups clogging up his hdd.

My first question regarding this improvement is, does it apply to SSD? Because I couldn't care less about having massive storage drives (although bluray rips and flac music collections do take up a fair bit of space), I just want to be able to put my games folder (Steam) on a fast drive that can actually fit more than a few games at once.

 

No, it's not a NAND flash technique, it's a bits on a platter technique - mechanical hard disks only.

 

The first this I thought in when I was this was

"OMG SOMEONE POURED SALT ON THEIR HARD DRIVE!!!"

 

This sounds epic, but I already have 2TB. Apart from servers, who really needs more HDD space?

 

I think this too, I'm already at 4Tb, maybe I just got alot of trash in it, but I never thought that I would fill a 2Tb disk so quickly

 

The more storage I get my hands on the more archives of **** TV shows I seem to acquire.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you, I seem to be the "go to guy" for "that episode of <x> that was really bad, to the stage of funny", and I quite enjoy that.

 

Would I be right in thinking this'll push down the £/GB ratio of Mechanical HDDs sharply? Because that's never a bad thing (I mean, we can say "I'll never use that much!" but we always do... tell me I'm wrong ).

However, Kryder's Law becomes somewhat debunked we get a 6-fold increase overnight

 

I use about 300GB in my main PC, no chance of me buying a 12TB HDD!

My next purchase will be an SSD.

 

It'd be good to put into a NAS box - imagine a 3-disk RAID5 NAS that can hold 24TB! Awesome.

 

If it's an increase of 6x on current drives then shouldn't it be 6x3TB = 18TB? Either way I'd love to get hold of some for my unraid server

I'll be all set up for when 4K HD videos start to appear which may be 200GB per film.

 

Wouldn't this also mean an increase in read/write speeds too as I though that was related to aerial density, assuming the spindle speed is the same. Allowing for faster data storage without going to ssd costs.

 

DAMNIT... Just ordered my first of 4 3TB HDD's for my NAS : | Ohhh well! 9TB's of RAID5 goodness will just have to do (plus the 2TB's already in my pc...)

 

Exactly what I was thinking.

 

Chaps, lets remember that 4TB disks are now available and 5 (if you believe a man in a video!) will be available by Christmas. But a significant problem we now have with anything over 1Tb is the amount of error correction constantly taking place. The workload to keep the data being read and written intact is increasing at a much faster rate than the density of the data stored.

I am hoping that when the 4TB disks are available in higher numbers, and maybe the 5, that the 3TB disks drop in price a fair bit. But I must agree with one of the first posts. I have... 20 ish TB of storage and the number of awful B movies, sci fi movies and the like I have collected scares me! Trying to justify buying new disks to expand my NASs rather than clearing out the rubbish.

Yes its only magentic media HD, not SSDs. And yes, the non random read and write speeds will increase as they always do when density is increased. But, as the amount of EC increases and the accuracy required by the head increases, dont expect random read/write to increase at anything like the same pace.

SSDs IMO will increase in size, decrease in price and see moderate increase in performance. But, lets be honest now. We have saturated SATA3 just about. And in the last 5 years we have moved from using 'rubbish old tech' in SSDs to using the best flash and controller chips. So its unlikely we will see significant increases in future.