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Can you even imagine an MP3 player with a 500,000 GB capacity? It’s pretty much beyond belief. The most generous player today can only hold around 40,000 songs – they’d hardly make a dent on this.
The thing is, it could easily happen. Scientists at the University of Glasgow have created a nanotechnology breakthrough that could increase storage capacity by 150,000 times. It could mean 500,000 GB on a single chip and inch square.
The Glasgow scientists worked to create the molecule-sized switch that’s at the heart of it all.
Professor Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow said,
“What we have done is find a way to potentially increase the data storage capabilities in a radical way. We have been able to assemble a functional nanocluster that incorporates two electron donating groups, and position them precisely 0.32 nm apart so that they can form a totally new type of molecular switching device. The key advantage of the molecule sized switch is information / transistor density in traditional semi-conductors. Molecule sized switches would lead to increasing data storage to say 4 Petabits per square inch. This breakthrough shows conceptually that this is possible (showing the bulk effect) but we are yet to solve the fabrication and addressing problems. The fact these switches work on carbon means that they could be embedded in plastic chips so silicon is not needed and the system becomes much more flexible both physically and technologically.â€

That's just ridiculous. Why would you even do that unless you plan on owning every song ever created, demos and final tracks, plus remastered tracks. I just don't even see why that would be necessary.

i think bill gates said something about a 486 being more then enough space for anyone.

sure right now its insane to picture this, but in a few years we may have better recording devices which means songs will cost more bites to store. if you have such a large amount of space possible, then you could more practically store better file quality which could mean crisper sound or more symphonic style sounds. just look at the old midi compared to the mp3. when space is no longer an issue technology moves quickly to cover the ground.

486 what? Megs?



500000GB sounds so much more than 500TB. Reguardless... that's an unimaginable ammount of storage. But I won't say it's not something that won't be needed in the future. Look at it this way. When Bill said what he did... he had no idea that multiple movies that are around 700 meg each would be crammed onto hard drives. And the truth of that still exsists today. There will eventually be some format of something (perhaps a new media type) that will require gigs upon gigs to run and maintain. Ah well...

Whatever the case may be, there is one truth... it'll be expensive as hell.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Bill Gates"

thats the actual quote, though i thought it was 486k. i still have one of those old drives in my scrap computer parts bin.

I want one.

@lantis - with the way size is advertised 500,000GB probably IS more than 500TB cus they sort of advertise based on 100bytes is a meg and so on... so 500TB probably isn't quite 500,000 fictional GB but 500,000 fictional GB is ... neither of which i suppose is ACTUALLY 500 real TB but beggars can't be choosers or something...


anyway, i want one.

You bring up a good question. No hard drive is ever really as advertised. A 160 GB hard drive will never really be 160. It's kind of a generalization of sorts.

But seeing as it's kind of random but kind of on a percentage scale... I wonder how much 500 TB would really actually be.

Personally, that's too f*cking much for an mp3 player.

Think of the cost! If you need more than what's out today then
you probably need 50 million big macs, and 10 tons worth of
Pepsi cola to go with it, you fatties.

That's ALOTTA Gigs.

For today's standards, anyway. Maybe an interactive 3D super-duper mega movie in the future will take up dozens of Gigs, who knows? Actually... don't those guys who work in the movie industry already have to deal with files over 10 Gig big?

I'm sitting at my computer, gig'in my pr0nz.

More than 1TB of pr0n is more than enough.

a company makes hard drives and uses a graph to plot which ones make the cut. just like soda, some will exceed expectations (full to the top), others will flop for fullness (a failed unit). the lower end get sold as lesser drives or discarded depending on amount, the ones that fall within the range are sold at the regular range (but vary by a gig or two for our example), and the ones that exceed the range are kept and sold later on as a new and more space filled drive.

the available space on a drive can be quite different. a 60 gig drive just means that on average there will be around 60 gigs available. some lucky people will get 60 gig drives that exceed this amount, others will get lower end flops that just made the cut.

its all a crazy math and graph calculation, but i forgot the name of it.

I can't see any reason why I wouldn't get that.
At one point in time I had a CD collection of about 1,100-1,200.
At one point.
Every once in awhile I seem to lose most of what I own, and start over.
The idea of never losing it because I had everything I could possibly need, and the capacity to continue on making additions to what constitutes Everything, is an attractive one to me.

To make a real post..

I don't know about you guys, but I like lossless audio formats. You know, single songs that can easily pass 50mb. If an audio player came out with a harddrive as big as that, I would assume it could handle formats other than the usual suspects. I'd also expect it to be able to given the pricetag this thing would be bound to have.

But, when a single album exceeds 400mb easily, I can see a harddrive as big as this one beginning to make sense. I used to collect full albums, and had over a thousand - and I wasn't even comparable to the collections of some people I knew. If everything was in FLAC or some other lossless format, filling one of these becomes more realistic.

<3

I have a lot of music especially discography's for all my favorite rap groups and other sh*t. My music folder is atleast for 200gb.

That's alot of music.

Actually they are as advertised. The suffix for what you are thinking is GiB, or gibibyte, meaning it's measured in Binary or 2^30 instead of 10^9. While GiB may be the software standard GB is the hardware standard. As for how this compares 500TB ~= .9 * 500TiB = 455 TiB, or the hardware amount is 10% less than the software measurement. While Karr is technically correct, in the most confusing way possible, some drives do have a miniscule percentage more or less Bytes than advertised because the process of magnetizing a disc to that kind of precision has an error ratio. So you get a couple of bad sectors/individual bytes on a sector. This pales in comparison to the gap between GiBs and GBs, so it can be ignored.

As for movies being 700MB that's a very low ball estimate, as most are 4.9-8GB for DVDs, and now 25-50GB for BluRay. Of course with a 500TB = 500000 GB < 500 TiB, you could store 10000 BluRay movies. I don't think anyone legally owns that many movies. So at that point normal consumers would not need that much, or at least more than that.

Funny we're quoting Bill Gates, why don't you ask him how much space you need just to run Vista (HINT: It's not 640KB, or even close).

Now the bigger question is what is the seek and rotational latency like, that's what's really important.