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Researchers Develop Atomic-Scale Hard Drive That Writes Information Atom By Atom (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Researchers in the Netherlands have created a microscopic storage system that encodes every bit with a single atom -- allowing them to fit a kilobyte in a space under 100 nanometers across. That translates to a storage density of about 500 terabits per square inch. For comparison, those 4-terabyte hard drives you can buy today are about 1 terabit per square inch. That's because, unlike this new system, they use hundreds or thousands of atoms to store a single bit. "Every bit consists of two positions on a surface of copper atoms, and one chlorine atom that we can slide back and forth between these two positions," explained Sander Otte, lead scientist at Delft University of Technology, in a news release. Because chlorine on copper forms into a perfectly square grid, it's easy (relatively, anyway) to position and read them. If the chlorine atom is up top, that's a 1; if it's at the bottom, that's a 0. Put 8 chlorine atoms in a row and they form a byte. The data the researchers chose to demonstrate this was a fragment of a Feynman lecture, "There's plenty of room at the bottom" (PDF) -- fittingly, about storing data at extremely small scales. (You can see a high-resolution image of the array here.) The chlorine-copper array is only stable in a clean vacuum and at 77 kelvin -- about the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Anything past that and heat will disrupt the organization of the atoms. The research was published today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
The chlorine-copper array is only stable in a clean vacuum and at 77 kelvin -- about the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Anything past that and heat will disrupt the organization of the atoms.
As someone who's been using dos/windows for the past 30 years or so.... THIS is the only problem you've got? Meh.
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What did YOU invent this week?
I'm still waiting for someone to invent something that somehow does NOT end up being a decade-long litigation between themselves and the fucking patent hoarders.
Good fucking luck with that shit.
So according to moore's law, we have about 18 years of storage density progress left.
Ahem. It's a proof-of-concept, technology demonstrator. Some of us have been in IT long enough to remember 10 Megabyte disk units for mainframes, that were the size of washing machines (1970s tech). My first PC had a 20MB full-height hard drive: that was 1987. My current box has 2x256 GB SSDs: their combined size is roughly that of a pack of cigarettes (Mind you, I also have several TB of magnetic disk storage. . .).
Technology evolves. This will as well. . .