The researchers in Singapore have discovered a way to boom the capacity of a harddisk space upto six times and all it takes is a pinch of Sodium Chloride also known as chemical-grade table salt.
Here’s how harddrives
work at the moment. The spinning magnetic platters are covered in
randomly distributed nanoscopic grains. These work in disorganized
clumps of tens to form one bit of data. The latest drive models hold up
to 500 gigabits of data to every square inch.
A new take on the idea, headlined by Joel Yang of Singapore’s
Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), ditches the idea
of inefficient patternless clumps and instead makes slightly larger
grains (10 nanometers, up from seven to eight nanometers), in regular
patterns, which each store one bit.
“It’s like packing your clothes in your suitcase when you travel,” a
spokesperson for IMRE said. “The neater you pack them the more you can
carry.”
The secret is salt. An e-beam lithography process produces fine nano-scale structures for the discs, but when Yang added sodium chloride
to the developer solution he found that he could produce nanostructures
with a much higher resolution: down to 4.5 nanometers half pitch,
without prohibitively expensive equipment.
This method allows data to be stored at significantly higher capacities : 1.9 terabits per square inch have been demonstrated, and a capacity of 3.3 terabits per square inch is possible.
This six-fold increase would mean that a terabyte hard drive could,
in the future, hold six terabytes of data on the same size platter.
Courtesy-Wired.co.uk
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