Your computer’s hard drive; the piece of equipment that stores all the data and information you put onto your computer from pictures and music to book sized word documents has always been something to expand upon. From larger internal hard drives to external hard drives computer users are always at a want for more space on their PCs; even if they’ll never use it, knowing it is there can be a selling point for some. Now, researchers in Singapore have devised a method of increasing hard drive space up to six times what is generally considered current capacity. The secret: salt.
It isn’t fancy salt either. The salt that was used in this discovery is, quite simply, sodium chloride; your standard table salt.
arstechnica.com reports that this discovery was made by Dr. Joel Yang of Singapore’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE). As a graduate student, Dr. Yang developed a new electron-beam lithography process which used sodium chloride to enhance the developer solution. After graduation from MIT, Dr. Yang and his team at IMRE, along with researchers from the National University of Singapore and the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research’s Data Storage Institute have perfected the process and from this have been successful in their attempts to create magnetic storage media with a density of 3.3 terabits per square inch.
Hard drives are digital magnetic storage devices that feature rotating rigid platters. Information is magnetically written to the platter, storing the data. The magnetic platters are coveres in nanoscopic grains that work in disorganized clumps of tens to form one bit of data.
Dr. Yang’s sodium chloride approach to data storage allows for more effective distribution of the magnetic grains on the disk surface of a hard drive through “nanopattering,” or packing the gains together in clusters to prevent data bleeding from one bit of storage to another.
Hard drives on the market today can typically hold up to 500 gigabits of data per square inch. In one terabit there is space for 1,024 gigabits. For those who don’t want to do the math, that’s an increase of roughly 2879 gigabits of space per square inch on a hard drive.
In English; that’s around an additional 719,800 MP3-encoded songs to the space you currently have in one square inch of hard drive; the need for more space may be over.