One could say there can never be too much available storage space, so any research project that can expand the number of gigabytes on a storage unit is welcome.
As it happens, this very type of research milestone has been reached by a team from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
First, we'll provide some context: a magnetic drive (or a hard disk drive, as HDDs are commonly known), usually needs about 3 million atoms to store a single bit.
Given that the maximum capacity, nowadays, is 4TB, that means that HDDs have loads of atoms.
The KIT people embedded a magnetized iron atom into a molecule made of 51 atoms. That done, they applied a current that flipped the atom's magnetic charge.
This, in turn, altered the resistance of the molecule, which they immediately measured, finally storing one bit of data on it. Essentially, they reduced the atom requirement from 3 million to 51.
“Using a scanning tunneling microscope, we applied defined elec-tricity pulses to the nanometer-sized molecule,” said Wulf Wulfhe-kel, head of the research group at KIT’s Physikalisches Institut.
“This reproducibly changes not only the magnetic state of the iron, but also the electric properties of the molecule.”
We wouldn't be surprised if people became overcome with excitement. It is not every day that someone finds a way to give SSDs 50 thousand times more storage capacity.
We still remember the ripples that Seagate caused when it promised to make 60 TB HDDs within the next several years. If the KIT team refines its technique, it will leave even those behemoths in the dust, since single-molecule storage of this kind means that a lone SSD will possess petabyte-level storage instead of one “measly” terabyte.
We aren't sure how many years it will take for practical applications to proliferate. Hopefully, not too many.
Via: Scientists Find Way to Give SSDs 50 Thousand Times More Capacity
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