Rohan Mathawan
26 July 2018
A team of Canadian researchers has made a major breakthrough in the storage of data thanks to another element. Till now hard drive manufacturers were using helium to help increase hard drive capacity for many years.
A team of scientist from the University of Alberta have successfully used hydrogen atom to store data. The atom that was applied to the silicon chip was half the size of a fingernail. With the help of a scanning tunneling microscope, they were able to cut and pasted individual atoms to write zeros and ones.
Roshan Anchal, a doctoral student said, Working with hydrogen atoms allowed them to store a ton of data in a very small amount of space. Eventually, you can take all the songs on iTunes that are roughly 45 million and store them on the surface of one quarter.
The team was able to pin storage density at 128TB per square inch.
But they had a tiny issue, the read and write speeds. To record a small amount of data, it took between 10 and 15 minutes. They tried to copy and paste the first 24 note of Super Mario Brother theme.
But this doesn’t make their accomplishment any less impressive. They were able to do this under real-world circumstances.
(Image – techmentor.com)