Re: 2.3TB on a credit card?

ronkean@juno.com
Fri, 24 Sep 1999 23:43:29 -0400

On Fri, 24 Sep 1999 12:39:13 -0500 "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
> 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?
> --

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.

Ron Kean

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