Data developments

A team of Dutch scientists has made a major breakthrough in rewritable memory storage, developing a one-kilobyte device with an information density they say is two to three orders of magnitude beyond current hard disk and flash technology, according to research published in Nature Nanotechnology.

The device stores information in the positions of individual chlorine atoms on a copper service and can condense the information contained in all books ever written down to the size of a postage stamp, according to Sander Otte, a physicist at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delf) Kavli Institute of Nanoscience and senior author of the study.

Full commercialisation is a way off at this stage, given that stable information storage can only be demonstrated at a temperature of 77 Kelvin (-196°C). Additionally, speeds are slow — a single write and read process takes minutes to complete, but Otte said that promise lies in the fact that devices can now be engineered at atomic level, paving the way for future development.

Image credit: © iStockphoto.com/Oleksiy Mark