Moore’s Law (or rather Kryder’s Law) has just been decimated. Researchers at IBM just tore out those Wikipedia pages, sneered at them, then proceeded to show the world how five years of work has lead to new possibilities for mass data storage.
Atomic-Scale Storage
Really, all storage is atomic-scale, but what these researchers have done is reduce the amount of atoms it takes to store your data. They’re doing this with the creation of the first ever atomic-scale magnetic super-cooled structures. With this atomic-scale magnetic memory they have successfully shown that a single bit of information can be stored in as few as 12 magnetic atoms. This increases storage capacity by nearly 100,000 times over the currently available hard-disk drives, which use about one million atoms to store a single bit of information.
Being able to increase the data density of devices means more storage in a smaller space: specifically, storage that is 100 times denser than today’s hard disk drives, 150 times more dense than solid-state memory. An entire music and movie collection could fit on a charm-sized pendant around your neck. Almaden physicist Andreas Heinrich explains how he and his teammates started with 1 atom and a scanning tunneling microscope and eventually succeeded in storing one bit of magnetic information reliably in 12 atoms.
You could literally house all of your 3D data on a device as small as a fingernail and probably still have room for more. There’s no information on when the tech could become more commercially available, but there is this fancy infographic you can download to show your friends.
Source: IBM. Thanks Danny Tas!
