14 DAY TRIAL // Hard drive capacity has been growing rapidly for the past few years, but no matter how large a drive is we still don't seem to get enough room for storing all of our data, so scientists have come up with a new way of increasing capacities using plain table salt.
Right now HDD max out at 3GB, but Dr Joel Yang at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) has developed a method that can expand data density to 3.3Terabit/inch2.
While this may not sound all that impressive to you, if this technology would be used for producing hard drives it could mean that 18TB of storage could be possible while using the same form factor.
Even more impressive then the capacity that can be reached is the material which make all this possible: sodium chloride, also known as table salt.
Without going into too many details, by adding sodium chloride to the mix, the scientist was able to use a single 10nm nanoscopic magnetic grain to store one bit of data, which should have previously taken several 7mm grains (a cluster) to achieve the same feat.
While definitely promising, the sad thing is that nobody knows just how much time it will take before this technology makes it into mainstream. (via Geek)