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Technology News
Want to increase hard drive space? Just add salt
Matt - October 18th, 2011 2:20 PM
Tags: gigabyte, hard drive, salt, terabyte
Yes, that’s right. According to researchers in Singapore, all that the manufacturers need to do to bump up hard disk storage capacity to six times current figures is add some salt! Well, sodium chloride to be exact.
The way hard drives work at the moment is that the spinning magnetic platters are covered in nanoscopic grains that are distributed randomly. They work in disorganised clups of tens to form one bit of data. Current hard drives can hold 500 gigabits of data to every square inch.
According to Joel Yang, of Singapore’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), a new take on the idea is to ditch the inefficient clumps and instead make larger grains (ten nanometres, which would be up slightly larger than the current 7 to 8), in regular patterns that would each store one bit.
A spokesperson for IMRE said, “It’s like packing your clothes in your suitcase when you travel, the neater you pack them the more you can carry.”
The secret for all of this is ordinary salt. At the moment, an e-beam lithography process produces the fine nano-scale structures for the discs. However, when Yang added sodium chloride to the developer solution he found that he could produce a higher resolution nanostructure without the need for 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.
Let’s hope this becomes standard for all hard drives soon! My terabyte drive is looking a little full. What would you do with a 6 terabyte drive? Let us know in the comments section below.
