
Scientists pave the way for large-scale storage at the atomic level - known
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21702343-individual-atoms-offer-ultra-dense-information-storage-scientists-pave-way
======
dexwiz
From -269ºC to -196ºC is actually a huge improvement. Its the difference
between liquid helium (expensive) to liquid nitrogen (cheap). Getting
something that cold is hard, but keeping it there is just a matter of
insulation. There seems to be a different kind of physics when you get that
cold. Stable single atom structures, superconducting magnets, etc. It's all
based around the idea that nanometer structures are now stable.

The big issue with bringing these kind of products to the general market is
that we operate at a much higher temperature, the range of liquid water. And
these technologies may never be able to improved to a point that they work at
room temperature. Instead of moving those technologies into our range, I think
could focus on moving our technologies to that range and improving/shrinking
containment vessels. Self contained units with periodic maintenance/refills
are viable (eg vacuum tubes). Having someone to top off a super computer's
liquid nitrogen every couple of weeks is not a hard ask. We just have to make
everything else work at that temperature so the entire unit can be cooled and
contained, instead of just a specific section. Integrated circuit boards are
already black boxes to 99.9% of the public, so sealing them in a cooled vessel
is viable.

I know MRI/NMR machines already operate at that range, but they are way to
big/specialized to be considered the general market. No one has an MRI machine
in their medicine cabinet. I was once interning for a chemist, and asked if he
ever thought we would have desktop NMR machines. He said there was no way they
would ever be small enough. I then pointed at his laptop and remarked that is
what people thought about computers 50 years ago.

~~~
coldcode
The problem I see is what happens if the temperature doesn't stay in the
required range for whatever reason like power failures, earthquakes, sloppy
maintenance - you lose the data. Having such an enormous storage that is so
fragile seems to have limited usefulness. If they ever get it to room
temperature and have it be stabile then it might be more interesting.

~~~
Sharlin
There is an existing engineering discipline centered around keeping a lot of
precious fragile data at liquid nitrogen temperatures for decades without
malfunction. Say what you want about cryonics but the storage part is proven
technology.

~~~
ska
As I understand it the tract record isn't actually that good.

~~~
stcredzero
track

~~~
goldenkey
If you're going to correct people, at least specify the correction
unambiguously. Pedantry is uhpaulleng.

[http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/track%20record](http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/track%20record)

------
flashingleds
This is because it just got published in Nature something, the earlier open
arXiv version from April is here:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.02265](https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.02265) 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, if I crunched the numbers
correctly). 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.

~~~
Dylan16807
Pretty cool, but keep in mind that it's at a massive scalability disadvantage
compared to flash because of the requirement for a read/write head. Current 3D
flash may only be 1.7Tbpsi, but that's with a layer 4 microns thick. Make it a
millimeter thick and you're in the same areal density range.

------
stephanheijl
While this is very intesting, the storage mentioned does seem somewhat small
to me. The article compares the area covered by the text to be a little
smaller than a HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus). However, the genome of HIV
apparently stores approximately 9.2kb (kilo basepairs, not kilobytes, so
~18KiB) of information. It also doesn't need to be kept at -196C. Are there
any viable tactics for atom-based storage that could rival this density?

~~~
dexwiz
Genetic storage is way more resistant to bit rot than conventional computers.
DNA is not stable, has a full time support system fixing it, and still has a
relatively high mutation rate. But biological systems on the whole are much
more resistant to individual errors.

Yes, single mutations can cause horrible diseases, but these mutations are
either in the active site of proteins, or disrupt folding. A large portion of
proteins are "bulk." If you look at protein simulations, only a small section
of the protein is simulated, and the rest is just approximated as charged
mass. Changes there are much less impactful and noticeable. As for it to be a
disease, it had to be present at time of concept. If it happens during life
(which is does, millions of times a day), the cell either ignores it or dies.

~~~
dekhn
DNA kept cool and dry is stable for millenia. Any storage done with DNA would
likely be done in a fixed environment outside of the cell.

~~~
choicewords
I thought natural radioactive decay was sufficient to mangle DNA.

~~~
skykooler
Same for other storage devices.

------
nik61
[http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/Ms_fnd_in_a_Lbry.html](http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/Ms_fnd_in_a_Lbry.html)

~~~
saganus
Wow! Excellent read!.

It's even more impressive since the footnote says:

"This story first appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
December 1961"

 _Fifty-five_ years ago!

It reminds me of a recent hn article (if anyone has a link it would be great!)
that I believe it was about how Dropbox tests it's storage system, layer by
layer, and the final error graph is always a flat line at "0", since every
error is caught and corrected in one of the layers below.

Will it ever reach the case where it will be impossible to really guarantee
that we have the right data?

PS: I can't seem to find the article using Algolia or even Google... maybe it
was not Dropbox but other storage company? I really would like to find this
story but for some reason never marked it as favorite or even upvoted it!
(maybe I wasn't logged in).

~~~
moreati
Perhaps it was [https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/07/pocket-
watch/](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/07/pocket-watch/) ?

    
    
        > we use a variant on Reed-Solomon erasure coding that is similar to Local Reconstruction Codes
        > according to this model, a given block in Magic Pocket is safe with 99.9999999999999999999999999% probability!

~~~
saganus
Awesome! Yes, exactly that.

I tried searching for "petabyte" but I guess I came 1 order of magnitude
short...

Thanks a lot! It was driving me crazy..

------
guelo
Sure, maintain your chlorine lattice at -196ºC and then use your handy
scanning tunneling microscope to manually move atoms around.

I would say "paving the way to large-scale storage" is extremely generous for
what they actually achieved, to the point of being incorrect.

~~~
dcre
I cannot imagine what you think "paving the way" is supposed to mean.

~~~
amelius
It means there is now a known route to reach a certain destination.

------
audleman
This technology is amazing, but what's even more amazing is that writing at
the atomic level is only 100x denser than what we've already achieved.

------
goldenkey
This is pure buzz. Physical storage does not make any sense when light based
or magnetic based storage is much faster and denser. It only makes sense if it
is very permanent, ie. Etching sapphire discs [1] The position of atoms is
just one classical property. Quantum properties like spin and charge are much
more numerous and versatile.

[1] [http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/nanoform-laser-
etched...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/nanoform-laser-etched-
sapphire-data-storage/)

~~~
saganus
That sapphire disc tech is very interesting.

And while browsing their product sheet [1], I thought this would be great for
me to store my most valuable stuff. And then it hit me... if I bought the 500
or even the 2500 document disc... what would I save there?

Probably some family pictures (unfortunately it doesn't seem to support
colors, understandably so), a paper I published years ago. Maybe my college
thesis. Legal documents perhaps like birth certificates and such.

But then I wished I could store music. Is there any graphical representation
of music that would suit this format? Or is the only reasonable option to
store the actual 1's and 0's of an MP3 or something like that?

[1]
[http://www.fahrenheit2451.com/index.php/shop](http://www.fahrenheit2451.com/index.php/shop)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The resolution is too low to store even a single stereo FLAC file of a three
minute song.

But this isn't really a viable digital storage system. It's a nice novelty,
but it's not designed for serialisation in the way that optical ROM systems
are.

It might be possible to increase the resolution with a better laser and
optics, and make the disks serialisable. But I suspect you still wouldn't get
the density you need for practical media storage.

~~~
aidenn0
I think you're wrong.

Their smallest listed item (1" medallion) is 110 megapixels. Even storing just
1 bit per pixel (which is conservative) you can store almost 3 minutes of CD-
quality FLAC[1]. Seeing as it's grayscale, you can almost certainly store
multiple bits per pixel. At even 2bpp, you would have plenty of space for 3
minutes of flac, plus some form of BCH code.

The largest listed item is 30GP, which would probably be enough for over a day
of FLAC audio.

1: 110Mbit / (32bits/sample * 44100 samples/s) ~= 78s of uncompressed audio.
FLAC is roughly 50% compression ratio, so ~= 2:36 of FLAC.

[edit]

In case people were wondering: the reason this didn't pass my "sniff" test is
that War and Peace is shown on an example prototype. That is ~3MB in UTF-8 and
a grayscale picture of a page of text at a readable resolution is about 2
orders of magnitude larger than the binary representation, and 300MB is
obviously way more than a 3 minute FLAC.

------
ArtDev
Datacenter on the moon? At -200 degrees Celsius in the shade, the temperature
on the moon is perfect. Of course, moving the data would be a problem but it
would be a great backup solution!

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
You could do a daily backup of the entire Internet to something smaller than a
thumb drive. :)

------
smellf
> Dr Otte reports read speeds of 1-2 minutes per block. He reckons he could
> boost those speeds drastically, to about a megabit per second. That would be
> a big improvement, but still thousands of times slower than modern hard
> drives.

Try tens of times slower. There would absolutely be applications for
nonvolatile memory that reads at 1 Mbps but has this kind of insane memory
density. For most applications you'd probably have to make the technology
stable at room temperature though.

~~~
neckro23
Thousands is correct. A magnetic hard disk has a bandwidth of well over 1
Gbps.

Long-term stability (and this would only be any good for long-term storage, at
that rate!) is a pretty tall order. Even current storage methods can't really
manage it.

~~~
smellf
Well, I did mix up my units - I should have said hundreds. Megabits is a weird
unit to use for hard drives.

But read speeds on a spinning HDD are typically going to be between
50-100MBps, so 400-800 Mbps.

------
mjhirn
I am wondering if the technique described in this Nature publication from
yesterday [1] to potentially operate quantum computers at room temperature,
could be used for the atomic storage as well. Does anyone know?

[1]:
[http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160718/ncomms12232/full/nc...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160718/ncomms12232/full/ncomms12232.html)

------
markhahn
anyone else notice that some of the transcriptions seem wrong, assuming a
fixed 8-bit encoding? for instance. the "rrange" doesn't have two columns with
identical bits.

~~~
cr1895
Look at the rows

------
deegles
How vulnerable is this to cosmic rays?

------
juancassim1
Interesting. Hadn't considered the applications of atomic storage before

