New Hard Drive Tech Could Significantly Boost Storage Space

When it comes to computers, storage space and speed are becoming more and more of a selling point thanks to the uptake in SSD’s. Now researchers in the Netherlands have developed something that stores massive amounts of data into very tiny spaces.

The new hard drive could pack 500 terabits into a single square inch, a massive amount of memory into a tiny little space. The atom based hard drive is courtesy of Sander Otte and his colleagues at Delft University. While it’s not ready for public release yet the new system proves that atomic-scale data storage spaces are viable and very effective.

The new system is slow at the moment so it will require a little fine tuning to help catch up to the speeds which users have become accustomed to. Using the concept of binary numbers, the new system uses chlorine atoms atop copper atoms, if the chlorine atom is atop the copper plate then it’s a 1 but if it’s below its a 0.

With a write speed of minutes, you may want to hold off on ordering one to store all your movies and games. Otte admitted that “While the memory outperforms existing media by far in terms of capacity, it still stays far behind in terms of read/write speed. However, I foresee no physical boundaries that will prevent us from speeding up these processes to similar speeds that are currently seen in [hard disk drives]. It will be a technological challenge for sure, but in terms of physics it should work.”