Hello,

When will it be available:

http://ottelab.tudelft.nl/

Bertus

 

Hello,

When will it be available:

http://ottelab.tudelft.nl/

Bertus

I'm guessing - Tuesday?

 

I'm guessing - Tuesday?

As advertised releases rarely ever meet deadlines so I am thinking that Thursday of the following week would be more reasonable.

 

Sounds slow.

 

Sounds slow.

Yup, they obviously showed that traditional ascii character set is not possible. Look how many bits have to be set to make save a letter "A".

I'm not going to count them but I would estimate about 120 bits are set there.



They did say they could make it smaller, but that font would be hard to read...

 

I don't get it.

As of now, I have a micro SD card that is 128g and if that memory card was scaled up to the same size as a standard 3.5" hard drive while keeping a proportional data density it would hold around a quadra byte of information.

 

Truly amazing. Who knows to what this will eventually lead?

 

It's truly amazing to me how the density of hard drives has increased -- from 39" multiple-platter, washing machine size (literally) drives that held a few megabytes per platter, to today's 3 1/2 inch drives that hold terabytes per platter. And apparently the end is not yet in sight (or perhaps the atomic scale device is that limt).

I worked on a DEC system that used some of those large hard drives, which stood about 3' tall setting on the floor. You could look inside and see the mechanism, which had a huge magnet about 6-8" in diameter for the head position motor. The head and linear motor controlling it was so heavy that the whole unit would visibly shake (spin cycle ) when the head was moving during normal operation.

 

I don't get it.

As of now, I have a micro SD card that is 128g and if that memory card was scaled up to the same size as a standard 3.5" hard drive while keeping a proportional data density it would hold around a quadra byte of information.

But solid state drives cannot be constantly re-written to (they begin to degrade after 100,000 write cycles). A hard disk can be read and written infinitly more times.

 

But solid state drives cannot be constantly re-written to (they begin to degrade after 100,000 write cycles). A hard disk can be read and written infinitly more times.

Yes but how often would you need totally dump and rewrite a quadribyte hard drive?

 

Yes but how often would you need totally dump and rewrite a quadribyte hard drive?

Well if your windows then.....

 

Who knows to what this will eventually lead?

It will lead to an enormous bloating of OS and app software. Nature (and any commercial software developer) abhors a vacuum .

 

Well if your windows then.....

Add that means what exactly?

The typical standard for SSD is 100K write but apparently no real limit to read cycles. So given that trying to write a quadrabyte hard drive to death in normal usage would be almost impossible.

Here's why. At a blazing write speed of 10 Gig per second (~5 two hour HD movies per second) to load a one quadrabyte drive would take over a day and to do 100,000 write then read then rewrite cycles back to back would take over 25 years.

In real life usage most of us would die of old age before enough of a quadrabyte drive had died from write failure to begin to be a concern.


BTW 1 quadrate of stereoscopic video data would be the equivalent of recording every second of what we see in our waking lives in 1080i format for roughly a decade.

So do you really have that many movies or raw video data justifiably recorded that you could sit down and watch let alone need to watch, erase, re-record and then rewatch again 100,000 times over?

 

Well I was thinking about page writes and virtual memory. Unless windows can move the physical location of its system files without corruption to the OS (alot of system files are read write) then it could use a 100,000 cycle on a single block quickly.

 

Well I was thinking about page writes and virtual memory. Unless windows can move the physical location of its system files without corruption to the OS (alot of system files are read write) then it could use a 100,000 cycle on a single block quickly.

There doesn't seem to be major issue with it in SSD's now.

 

Fair enough I stand corrected

 

It's truly amazing to me how the density of hard drives has increased -- from 39" multiple-platter, washing machine size (literally) drives that held a few megabytes per platter, to today's 3 1/2 inch drives that hold terabytes per platter. And apparently the end is not yet in sight (or perhaps the atomic scale device is that limt).

I worked on a DEC system that used some of those large hard drives, which stood about 3' tall setting on the floor. You could look inside and see the mechanism, which had a huge magnet about 6-8" in diameter for the head position motor. The head and linear motor controlling it was so heavy that the whole unit would visibly shake (spin cycle ) when the head was moving during normal operation.

I recall one computer, maybe 20 years ago (boards full of wire wrapped ICs) used for data crunching in the oil industry related surveys.

The HD unit, a cube of 2'x2'x2' was tested every time prior booting. It was frightening to see that thing shaking violently for I don't know how long, making loud noises. But then, one day I bought my Timex Sinclair....