With 15 terabytes of hard disk storage, the Watson system at Rensselaer will store roughly the same amount of information as its Jeopardy!

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Solid-state storage and memory technologies in general use less power than hard disk drives when they are active, and thus there can be power savings if some solid-state storage and memory can be used in a mixed storage technology environment in a way that reduces the spinning time of hard disk drives and thus decreases the power needs of a storage system.

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Sun is first releasing a new version of its Solaris operating system designed to integrate flash and traditional disk-drive storage, and in the next six months it plans to sell its own flash storage drives aimed at businesses.

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Such a dual storage system combines the advantages of higher speed flash memory with lower storage cost hard disk drives.

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Getting to that stage might mean combining self-assembly methods with lithography, or doing away with the head that reads the data-packed disk and instead creating a self-assembling solid-state system on the model of Flash memory storage used today.

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