Infinite harddisk is possible?

Just the thought,I think it's possible.
Infinite is exist in the principle.
As counting number to the infinite number that exist, but the reality,I can't reach to it.

So,there must be a way to create it in the future.

Infinity means never ending, unless such a thing was
infinite in size, or used some weird quantum principle,
it is not possible.

An infinite hard drive would not be possible, because then you would also need an infinite computer to use it, and an infinite amount of space to put it in. You could create a seemingly infinite one, but not a truly infinite hard drive.

Think about it this way:

Even if you could create a hard drive that took up all the space that was left, we would still be here, planets and stars would be here, so as long as something that is not the infinite hard drive exists, the hard drive cannot be infinite, for it will end at us.

Well if the universe is infinite in terms of space folding into itself, then why couldn't we create a pocket of space that also is infinite? A black hole has infinite mass doesn't it? We could have blackhole drives

Think of it like this, let's say you added one file that is a KB in size to a hard drive. If you were to copy that file twice every second, and copy the results every second, repeating this pattern for a minute, your hard drive would now have 576,460,752,303,423 MB (576,460,752 TB, 576,460 PB, or 577 EB) of space taken up. There is no way any single HD in the world can handle this much space.

What you're asking is for a HD, where this pattern can continue non-stop, without running out of space. Such a thing is not possible, because there would not be any material on Earth that can be used to make a HD that can withstand a file following this pattern for even a day.

[edit on 4-12-2006 by DJMessiah]

Originally posted by Toasty
A black hole has infinite mass doesn't it? We could have blackhole drives

Nope, they don't. A black hole generally has the mass of the body that creates it. If a 5 Solar mass star collapses into one, the resulting black hole will be about 5 Solar masses.

On top of that, how would you get the data out anyway?

Originally posted by cmdrkeenkid

Originally posted by Toasty
A black hole has infinite mass doesn't it? We could have blackhole drives

Nope, they don't. A black hole generally has the mass of the body that creates it. If a 5 Solar mass star collapses into one, the resulting black hole will be about 5 Solar masses.

On top of that, how would you get the data out anyway?

Than which quality of a blackhole has infinite properties,
I know one part does.


Using some aspect og quatum physics that we yet don't understand?

Normal laws of physics do not apply to black holes. Black holes have an outer shell which is known as the event horizon, which only sucks in objects that touch it. It will not suck in anything that is near it. Once the object has been pulled into the black hole, scientists theorize that the object is compressed into a single entity, with anything else that was pulled in.

Black holes have infinite mass and infinite weight only at the center (after the outer shell).

[edit on 4-12-2006 by DJMessiah]

There was talk a few years ago about using a bacteria as a form of memory and they proved the theory in a lab that the organism's used would retain a 0 or 1 binary register indefinitely in one of the proteins somehow.

Now what does this have to do with an infinite Hard Disk you ask ? well think of it from this perspective, if you could cultivate this bacteria so it reproduced you could effectively have a doubling of your memory daily so I guess that could well exhibit an infinity property.

if you had a hard drive that could go back in time and alter its data i guess it could have infinite space.

also, a hard drive is just a place that stores something, like paper can store letters. what makes a hard drive useful is the processor making meaning of the data. like when your brain processes and makes meaning of the letters on the paper. if one had an infinitely powerful processor, it could read everything there is in the universe by just looking at a few things. so the universe there was just stored in itself and read by the processor.

[edit on 12/4/06 by RedDragon]

Originally posted by RedDragon
if you had a hard drive that could go back in time and alter its data i guess it could have infinite space.

Wouldn't that just be the same as erasing a file and replacing it with another in current time?

In 1999, scientists estimated that all of human knowledge takes up 12.5747 exabytes (EB) of space, if ever transfered to a HD.

It's posible, don't know if it will be infinite but it will sound infinite, big very big , trilions and trilions of availible space disk.
manufacturers are going to swich to molecules to acive this, organic hard disks that uise molecules to store data, all the data will be stored in to molecules,I think they are going to use water molecules, the posibiliy to store data in such a device will open a new dor, each molecule having it's own data, they can create milions of molecules and then store the data in them, the advatage is that it all fits in a hard disk because of the molecules being so small in the size of microscopic level, virus problems would be biger, since you can now infect the sistem with actual viruses and bacteria.
This reminds me of the borgs, but it's real, I was reading about it , it seems it's still in research to the level of prototype.
The sistem will be able to create it's own molecules, run out of space? just add some water and woalla disk space is made

[edit on 4-12-2006 by pepsi78]

Originally posted by DJMessiah

Black holes have infinite mass and infinite weight only at the center (after the outer shell).

No, it's infinite density I think, and also infinite weight perhaps, but not infinite mass. The actual mass of the singularity is that of the object which formed the black hole.

Hard drives will become obsolete.

It seems a natural evolution to adopt light drives.

Hi all,

The question is a very interesting one, since it invokes both reading and writing of data as apposed to memory.

For example you may want to read this: -

Quantum computer works best switched off

It is not possible to read an infinite amount of information. The results would be meaningless. No information would be repeated and the results of the same computaion would always differ.

Information store is actually not a problem for us, I believe someone said HD's days were numbered??

This is FAR from the truth. As miniaturisation takes hold, you will find that it is far cheaper to produce high capacity HD's with over a terabyte of info on a disk the size of a penny.

This tech will find its way into mobile phones, hand held media systems, etc to begin with.

In the near future, most objects will have hd's in them, they will all work together through a globally accessible wireless broadband network.

A kind of peer-to-peer network on a global scale with all devices sharing data would result in a staggeringly MASSIVE amount of storage.

The real tech advances that we need to be researching now is faster DATA Transfer, that is the key to unlocking Memory Nirvana.

This is the future of the Internet as we know it. It won't be tied down to desktop pc's it will be out there omni present.

From that point it won't take long before we see implant applications, starting with glasses and eventually contact lenses with a display application.

Then 20 years + we will start to see the world first information transfer brain interface. For a direct link to the net.

The brain doesn't hold that much info......

How Many Bytes in Human Memory?

This type of implant tech would expand the surprisingly small amount of data our brains access far more information than it is actually physically required to hold.

All the best,

NeoN HaZe.

[edit on 4-12-2006 by Neon Haze]

This is FAR from the truth. As miniaturisation takes hold, you will find that it is far cheaper to produce high capacity HD's with over a terabyte of info on a disk the size of a penny.

Hard Drives are still slow, inefficient devices. Flash on the other hand is fast and really efficient. For mobile applications power efficiency will outweigh capacity any day of the week, because the number one complaint has always been how short a single charge is. Also, if flash reaches the point of RAM access speeds(as has been promised) more people(especially gamers) will be flocking to the Flash standard. For PC's, many people will opt for flash as a primary Boot drive and have a high capacity hard disk drive for storage capacity that is only accessed once in a while. There are already usable Flash drives in the 20 and 40 GB range(500 and 1000 USD respectively) on the market today and their price will fall as capacity increases. More and more Hard Drive manufacturers have nearly abandoned R&D research into Disk Drives altogether and have bet on either Internet Storage(using a variety of mediums) or Solid State Storage.

[edit on 4-12-2006 by sardion2000]

Hey there Sardion2000,

Flash drives are Slow and expensive to produce.

While Hard disks are getting smaller, less expensive and the amount of space they hold increasing.

Take look-see over at this article

Future of the hard drive 'secure'

This new "down through the disk" rather than "along it", perpendicular recording technique has changed the game when it comes to the amount of storage we are going to get from a hard disk; look out for a one terabyte hard disk early next year.

Just in case you do not know, 1,000 terabytes is a petabyte. Get used to those two words because we are going to be hearing an awful lot of them in the next couple of years.

Source: BBC News

And check this

Wikipedia - Flash memory

The cost per byte of flash memory remains significantly higher than the corresponding cost of a hard disk drive, and that (on top of finite number of erase-write cycles previously mentioned) has prevented flash from becoming a solid state replacement for the hard disk drive on normal desktop and laptop computers.

Source: Wikipedia

See where I am coming from??

Now power is a major issue when dealing with anything that has a kinetic element such as a HD's moving disk and arm.

However, recent developments mean that very soon we could see miniature hard drives powered by the same technology that power our fighter jets...

Gas Turbine Technology....

MIT researchers are putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip about the size of a quarter

MIT researchers are putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip about the size of a quarter. The resulting device could run 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight can, powering laptops, cell phones, radios and other electronic devices.

Source: nanotechwire.com

The future is nothing less than Exciting!!!!

All the best,

NeoN HaZe.


[edit on 4-12-2006 by Neon Haze]

They won't remain expensive for long.

Cell Phone, Cameras, Ipod and Wii sales(which depends heavily upon flash technology) will drive growth and that in turn will drive even further growth of R&D spending which will drive down costs and increase desirable attributes.

Apple is already on the path to providing flash solutions in most of their Ipods by 2008(according to their last Quarterly report Disclaimer: I am Long Apple and Nintendo) replacing their energy sucking mini-HDDs.

Same thing happened with HDDs will happen to Flash and eventually Millipede will come out to blow them all away(millipede is the one that can store terabites on the head of a pin).

People are impatient and are extremely willing to make compromises in the interests of instant gratification. Harddisk drives will never do this as every capacity and speed increase is neatly matched by software bloat and higher quality media files so as a long term stationary archival solution I'd go with an HDD. For a Mobile, Gaming, or Virtual Ram intensive application, I'll go with whatever is fastest regardless of the Capacity or Cost. A magnitude of order speed increase makes it all worth it.

On a side note,

As for CPU's I do not think Quantum will make it to the public for a looong time. As close as we Peons will get is something similar to a Punch card system, yet at the Nanoscale. Dubbed Rod-Logic in Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age. As you know, friction doesn't apply at the nanoscale, it's totally unrelated cousin, Van Der Waals forces is what will govern how small a nanoscale turing machine can get.

However, recent developments mean that very soon we could see miniature hard drives powered by the same technology that power our fighter jets...

Great. I'm aware of this technology and am not a fan to say the least...

[edit on 4-12-2006 by sardion2000]

Originally posted by sardion2000

However, recent developments mean that very soon we could see miniature hard drives powered by the same technology that power our fighter jets...

Great.

I'm aware of this technology and am not a fan to say the least...

Really??

Why ever not?? This solves quite a few power v weight/size problems. In adition although it requires a recharge, it takes no time to do it.

Fuel cell is the mid term solution to our energy issues.

All the best,

NeoN HaZe.

A. Tiny Gas Turbines equal Extremely Tiny Efficiency.

B. It's a Combustion based Technology and thus emits Carbon Monoxide.

C. It adds more moving parts when we should be headed in the other direction.

D. It adds more heat dissipation issues.

It makes sense for say a Military/Medical unit that needs reliability.

Fuel cell is the mid term solution to our energy issues.

Ethanol FC looks promising, though only if battery/capacitor technology remains stagnant.

My vision of the computer of the future is probably a lot different then yours. For one, my ideal mobile computer would need no external power whatsoever, except that which it receives from light, like a calculator. A combination of Rod Logic Turing Machines as well as Millipede and EInk display technology, it's entirely possible to build a computer that can do this. Just imagine a sheet of paper with the processing power of BlueGene... I can't, but considering how far we've come in the last 50 years, I wouldn't bet against such a possibility.

Remember, once we start engineering features under 0.1 microns, weird things start to happen as different forces start to dominate over familiar ones. Such a weird and seemingly contradictory world will require us to rethink a lot of things.

[edit on 4-12-2006 by sardion2000]

[edit on 4-12-2006 by sardion2000]