Two-inch diamond wafers could store a billion Blu-Ray's worth of data

www.newatlas.com ^ | April 27, 2022 | Michael Irving

[Jonty30]

Researchers in Japan have developed a new method for making 5-cm (2-in) wafers of diamond that could be used for quantum memory. The ultra-high purity of the diamond allows it to store a staggering amount of data – the equivalent of one billion Blu-Ray discs.

Diamond is one of the most promising materials for practical quantum computing systems, including memory. A particular defect in the crystal, known as a nitrogen-vacancy center, can be used to store data in the form of superconducting quantum bits (qubits), but too much nitrogen in the diamond disrupts its quantum storage capabilities.

[Sarcazmo]

You are in luck, there’s a position open on my staff.

I got Crystal, you guys can work on formatting.

[Rebelbase]

Why would anyone need that much storage?

[DouglasKC]

“Why would anyone need that much storage”

For things we can barely imagine today and things we haven’t imagined at all.

[Rebelbase]

I was jesting . It is what I said about a friend’s IBM 20 meg he bought in 1988.

[telescope115]

I can’t remember the name , but there is a computer program which is a free download from NASA that uses computing power linking participating computers into a network which processes signals from deep space, looking for ET signals. Maybe this disk would work for that.

[algore]

I once knew a girl named crystal, I wanted to fill up her nitrogen vacancies, but she wanted diamonds first

[rarestia]

SETI @ Home

[China Clipper]

That’s exactly what I said about my 20 mb hard drive in 1988!

"Hahah somebody set up us the bomb.... We get signal... All your base are belong to us"...

[Antoninus]

Why would anyone need that much storage?

I remember my dad, who was a hardware engineer at Univac back in the 1960s and 70s, mention that he had colleagues wondering the same thing when someone mentioned computer memory in the gigabyte range.

[DouglasKC]

I was jesting . It is what I said about a friend’s IBM 20 meg he bought in 1988.

I was messing around with Turbo Pascal back then and made a lot of cool little programs...and I mean LITTLE. I remember changing algorithms and tweaking code and then checking to see how much space the program occupied. I thought everyone did that.

Now space is so cheap programmers and companies just don't care.

[telescope115]

THANK YOU, that’s it!
It’s hell getting old….

[zeugma]

My first thought was along those lines also ... this makes the use of crystals to store data as seen in Superman and Star Trek movies seem plausible.

I've been expecting to see holographic memory storage since the early 80s. You could make a sphere that has infinite capacity. It would likely be a WORM drive though, as you couldn't erase data. You'd just keep writing. Of course, finding anything on the drive would be a pain.

[zeugma]

I was jesting . It is what I said about a friend’s IBM 20 meg he bought in 1988.

Me too. I couldn't imagine filling it up at the time. Now I have files that are 10GB or more. As a handy reference, I used to explain to folk that the Bible is about 4MB of ascii text. It's an easy metric to understand.

[SERE_DOC]

and I just sold my last 5-cm (2-in) wafers of diamond reader.