Table Salt Could Help Boost HDD Storage Density By a Factor of 5

hypnosec writes "A team of researchers has managed to boost storage density on traditional magnetic platters as high as 3.3 terabits per square inch using a technique that relies on NaCl — table salt. (Comparatively, a recent 4TB Seagate drive had an areal density of 625Gb per square inch.) A research team used a technique called nanopatterning to create arrays of magnetic bits that have more regular features (PDF) than the current traditional, randomly distributed technique. Team leader Joel Yang compares the technique to a well known traveling trick; 'It's like packing your clothes in your suitcase when you travel. The neater you pack them the more you can carry.' Yang said, 'In the same way, the team of scientists has used nanopatterning to closely pack more of the miniature structures that hold information in the form of bits, per unit area.'"

Comments

Re:Important note:

[Jeng]

Whenever the subject comes to data density I recall Heinlein take on this.

Basically you can take a match stick, and put a single mark on it. The distance between the mark and the end of the stick is the data being recorded. The higher precision the larger amount of data being recorded. With high enough precision a single mark could contain all the information that mankind has ever produced.

Re:briny

[TheRaven64]

An increase in linear read speed, anyway. Hard drive random seek times haven't seen much change since the '80s. Densities have improved by a factor of over a million while seek times have improved by a factor of less than two.

Re:Important note:

[IorDMUX]

If my math is right, Planck's length as your resolution limit gives you 6.187x10^34 possible marking positions per meter of stick, which means you can encode about 115 bits with one mark on a 1m Planck-grade stick.

Not quite. You can record one 115 bit value, which is very different from 115 bits. a 115 bit value has 2^115 = 42 million billion billion billion (10^34) bits of information.

A slight difference.