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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.

We already have a demand for very large, very-high-speed storage with in-memory databases. We already fill this need with highly-volatile RAM, and back it with more-persistent magnetic storage.

From the article, this is seen as a replacement for persistent storage, for which it will need a lot more stability and temperature work.

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.

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

track

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

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/track%20record

Heh, I knew that. I type "tract" too often for unimportant reasons. Guess it's in my fingers now.

"Say what you want about cryonics but the storage part is proven technology"

I've always wanted to say that cryonics as a field of study gives me indigestion. I would also like to say that all who study cryonics are villains and fiends. There. I said it. I feel so much better, thank you.

> Say what you want about cryonics but the storage part is proven technology.

Seems like a good beginning to a Crichton novel.

Power failures of short/intermediate duration aren't necessarily an issue: liquid N2 makes a great thermal reservoir.

In biology there's a fairly good track record of keeping samples cold (granted, mostly at the relatively balmy -80) for many years, generally without mishap.

And anyhow, storage device failure is already considered inevitable, it's mitigated by replication.

RRR is the answer.

Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy.

Not a problem if you can move your data center to the kuiper belt, there it will be stable at ambient temperature.

As long as moving your read/write head around doesn't generate more heat than you can radiate away...

> power failures, earthquakes, sloppy maintenance

Which could cause you to lose room-temperature storage too.

Take advantage of the density and put your data into 6 data centers instead of 3. It'll survive fine.

> 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.

Good-resolution NMR requires high frequencies and high magnetic fields. A 900 MHz NMR would use around 20 T--which is strong enough to pretty much require superconducting cryogenic magnets. Admittedly, a 100 MHz NMR requires only about 2-3T, which is close to what can be produced with a neodymium magnet, but you do get much, much noisier spectra.

With the larger field strengths, the need for magnetic field shielding pretty much restricts the ability to shrink it down to bench-scale machines.

Could you recommend a good book about design and construction aspect of NMR, like design of coils, magnets? Thanks!

Perhaps in 50 years we will have superconducting magnets at room temperature?

There is indeed actually such a thing as "benchtop NMRs" (like Picospin, Spinsolve, etc. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benchtop_nuclear_magnetic_reso...) but as you say they operate at a much lower resolution.

(My understanding is that these machines came on the market for certain applications where the low resolution wasn't as much of a problem as other things like affordability or portability.)

You were right to use that computer as an example.

Here's an MRI probe that's quite literally microscopic. Fig 1 says it's about 3.5µm in diameter. [1]

[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.04238v2.pdf

Atomic level storage does not have to necessarily be brought to the common liquid water temperature range user. There is a lot of massive storage demand from parties that are not necessarily interested to get in touch with the physical storage medium itself. These would benefit right here and now as soon as the technology could be mass-produced.

Atomic level storage does not have to necessarily be brought to the common liquid water temperature range user.

I think there are plenty of data centers that could learn to deal handily with liquid nitrogen temp cooling equipment.

Boiloff could even be used as a second-stage refrigerant to cool the rest of the datacenter.

Indeed, reducing 100 datacenter cabinets to one or two, seems like an attractive economic incentive.

-269 and -196 C understate the achievement.

4K and 77K are the same temperatures in absolute units.

The warmer experiment is twenty times hotter than the colder one.

For comparison in human terms, 20x hotter than room temperature is ~5700 C.

Edit: Mmm. Morning math mistakes. Thanks!

Keep to the Kelvin.

20 times room temperature that is 300K is 6000K, as hot as the shining Sun.

> Instead of moving those technologies into our range, I think could focus on moving our technologies to that range and improving/shrinking containment vessels.

Smartphones with liquid nitrogen cooling? :)