Magnetic Uranium - Periodic Table of Videos

Would you buy a hard drive containing uranium? One of our team has made a significant breakthrough involving a uranium compound which acts as a molecular magnet.

More chemistry videos at http://www.periodicvideos.com/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• uranium
• magnet
• hard
• drive
• disk
• disc
• computer

[michalchik]

You can't use a radioactive compound for high density data storage. Think of a 10 terabyte disk about the best we have now. Assume 1 molecule per bit and 2 U per molecule. That is 160 trillion uranium atoms. U-238 has a half life of 4 billion years.Within 1 year there would be 10's of thousands of bits lost.

[Bromirez]

@michalchik They said they were going to use depleted uranium though.

[rich1051414]

@Ryba125 No this would not be the case as they would be smart enough to overcome this. Redundant data and error correcting could fix these shortcomings. Look at the way RAID works now, using multiple media to increase reliability, speed, and data loss prevention. Current hard drives are not 100 percent effective, in fact fail all the time, but rarely do you even notice, as error correcting usually fixes it before you knew it.

[RamanShift]

@Ryba125 My point was that the percentage of damage due to things like bad sectors and head crashes may be greater than the percentage due to radioactive decay. I did a quick search and could find little on standard hard drive decay so I can't say for sure though. One could compare the probability of the radio-decayed bit/s effecting the system critically, to the probability of outright drive failure (mechanical/electrical etc.)

My original calculations were off, correct is 125p%.

[Ryba125]

@RamanShift It's not really about the percentage ; but about the fact that your files can be corrupted even if only 1 bit is missing .One disintegrated atom can prevent your computer for booting..

[RamanShift]

@michalchik It seems to me, that even with 10 thousand bits lost, the percentage of data loss would be such that it would hardly be noticeable. Assuming a 10TB drive and 10k bit loss, the percentage is something around 167x10^-12%. Seriously small. Assuming my calculations are correct, I would hazard a guess that current data loss percentages are greater than that.

[LightLink1992]

isnt in the orcanic chemestry much much bigger molekules?

[Poponfu1]

wow..professor.. clean your desktop !

[michalchik]

@Darkra98 :-) I used the half-life of depleted uranium in my calculations, 4.468 billion years, for u238 the least radioactive form of uranium. If you had a DU shell, after 4.5 billion years, even kept from any kind of exposure to outside forces, half of it would indeed be gone.

[Darkra98]

@michalchik They would use depleted uranium, very dense but no half life, depleted uranium is used in tanks and I don't see them disapearing

[ZdenekJindra]

@michalchik That's not really a problem, all hard drives use error-correcting algorithms already. The worse thing would be sector damage meaning that the drive would have to have lots of spare data areas to use once the bits go bad. And it would have to scrub the entire data area to fix weak sectors before the damage gets too severe to be fixed by ECC.

[breaneainn]

Eat some.