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

Important note:

[Baloroth]

Do not try this at home. Pouring table salt on your hard drive platters will not improve their storage density.

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:Important note:

[interval1066]

Took me a minute becuase the article was very difficult for me to read (navy font against a lighter blue background, brilliant) but all they did was add table salt (in aqueous solution I'm sure) to the developing chemicals in the etching process. That's interesting from a chemistry persepective; it implies they may be able to even higher densities by fiddling around with that catalyst- in stead of salt maybe they add shrimp cocktail to the process and get peta byte capacities or something.

Re:Important note:

[RoverDaddy]

No petabytes, because peta would object to the exploitation of shrimp.

Re:Important note:

[falzer]

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.

Re:Metaphors

[MozeeToby]

The whole time I was reading the analogy I was expecting him to finish with "That is a very graphic analogy which aids understanding wonderfully while being, strictly speaking, wrong in every possible way." With apologies to Sir Pterry.

Re:Metaphors

[nabsltd]

The rest of the conversation has been edited out, but it related seek times to finding shoes that match your outfit.

This post makes me feel like I'm reading a Douglas Adams book. Well done.

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.

This tech has culinary and security implications

[idontgno]

if you use the platters to cook your shredded potatoes for breakfast while computing and storing cryptographic trapdoor values, you'll discover...

<sunglasses>

your hashes are already salted.

YEEEEAAAAAAAHHH