(via Engadget)
Color me skeptical, but according to this announcement from Drexel University, we might in the not-too-distant future see USB keys (or whatever interface dominates at the time) with massive storage capacities.
Imagine having computer memory so dense that a cubic centimeter contains 12.8 million gigabytes (GB) of information.
Imagine an iPod playing music for 100 millennia without repeating a single song or a USB thumb-drive with room for 32.6 million full-length DVD movies.
Sounds good to me. I’ll order a couple now, to avoid the early adopters rush.
Spanier and his colleagues, Alexie Kolpak and Andrew Rappe offrom the University of Pennsylvania and Hongkun Park of Harvard University, are excited about their findings, but say significant challenges lie ahead, including the need to develop ways to assemble the nanowires densely, and to develop a scheme to efficiently write information to and read information from the nanowires.
Dang it, there’s always a catch, isn’t there? I predict that before the year is out, we’ll hear that this technology is feasable, but 5 years away. Next year, we’ll get an update that the technology is feasable, but still 5 years away. And let me go out on a limb and say that in 2008, we’ll get an update that this technology is feasable, but is roughly 5 years away.
In case you haven’t kept up with breakthrough technology, everything is roughly 5 years away.
[tags]Massive data storage[/tags]