From: KPJ (kpj@sics.se)
Date: Mon Sep 27 1999 - 04:27:20 MDT
It appears as if the Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> wrote:
|Okay, I just read a news article (paper, unfortunately - London Times)
|that alleges one Ted Williams of Keele University in the UK, inventor of
|NMR, claims the following:
|
|1. Storing 2,300 gigabytes in a credit card;
|2. Manufacturing it for 35 pounds;
|3. Scaling it up or down ("even a wristwatch could store 100GB");
|4. No moving parts;
|5. A company has been formed;
|6. Might start selling it in summer of 2001.
|
|Didn't say anything about access speed, but I got the impression it
|might be intended to replace RAM as well as hard drives.
|
|So is this real?
|--
It also appears as <ronkean@juno.com> commented:
|
|Magnetic hard drives retail for $10 to $20 per GB. At that rate 2,300 GB
|of storage would be worth something like $23,000. So if that much
|storage can be made for 35 pounds (= $56) it would represent quite a
|dramatic price breakthrough. Even if the raw access rate were
|considerably slower than magnetic hard drives, the effective access rate
|could presumably be raised by reconfiguring the access to be more
|parallel. It sounds too good to be true.
Mayhaps.
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Professor Ted Williams at Keele University in the UK has developed
a solid state memory system with a capacity of several times more
than is possible using current hard disks. The system is based on
the magneto-optical technology used for reading CD-Roms, and
has a capacity of 86GB per sq cm. However, it uses a different
operating approach. As the new high data-density substrate used
can be put on virtually any surface, the applications for the system
include computer and processor memory, particularly with palmtops,
credit cards and smartcards, where space is at a premium.
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[Source: Financial Times, 22/10/97, p.16.]
Do not magneto-optical media have lower read-write times than magnetic media?
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