Researchers have stored and read out a kilobyte’s worth of data using the world’s smallest hard disk – a speck of copper that stores the bits on chlorine atoms – and they say the technology could someday hold vast amounts of data in a minuscule space.
The team says they reached a storage density of 500 trillion bits per square inch, which is 500 times better than the best commercial hard disk currently available.
“In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single post stamp,” Sander Otte, a researcher at Delft University’s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in the Netherlands, said in a news release.
The technique is described today in a paper published online by Nature Nanotechnology.
