Dutch scientists create 500Tb per square inch hard drive

[HEXUS]

Data is stored using individual chlorine atoms on a copper surface, in a vacuum at 77K.

Read more.

[Platinum]

"Speed is an issue with the storage right now. The initial ‘formatting’ of the one kilobyte storage space took about a week"

So set it formatting now, come back at the end of time?

Interesting tech though

[Peter Parker]

I'm not sure what's new here. IBM wrote the letters "IBM" with xenon atoms on a metal surface in the 90s. No I'm wrong, 80s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_(atoms)

Wall St Journal link is paywalled, but:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/scie...hlorine-atoms/

And:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36824902

Because the chlorine atoms are surrounded by other chlorine atoms (except near the holes), they keep each other in place.

Oh and found the arxiv link:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.02265

So the clever bit is the atoms form a nice orderly grid and relatively stable (in liquid nitrogen). Cool.

Thing is, that storage density is just useless without scalable read/write speeds. Needing a moving part (the chlorine atoms) is a step backwards from SSDs. Changing from a single atom to some much larger atom that can store a charge/spin state might allow setting a bit without needing to physically move atoms around. It might be combinable with holographic read/write techniques, and not require liquid nitrogen to keep it stable.

I guess this is just one part of the puzzle, and if it all comes together we might get 100TB SSD drives in 20 years.

[Reviance]

"Speed is an issue with the storage right now. The initial ‘formatting’ of the one kilobyte storage space took about a week"

So set it formatting now, come back at the end of time?

Interesting tech though

We could always scale it up raid 0

[Iconix]

Atomic scale storage sounds incredibly volatile, you'd definitely need error correction for when solar particles blast into them. Insane density though, we're going to need a lot more bandwidth.

[qasdfdsaq]

"Speed is an issue with the storage right now. The initial ‘formatting’ of the one kilobyte storage space took about a week"

So set it formatting now, come back at the end of time?

Interesting tech though

Formatting hard drives or floppies or even punch cards wasn't much faster when the tech was first invented.

[Wozza63]

"Speed is an issue with the storage right now. The initial ‘formatting’ of the one kilobyte storage space took about a week"

So set it formatting now, come back at the end of time?

Interesting tech though

Formatting hard drives or floppies or even punch cards wasn't much faster when the tech was first invented.

Different data requirements back then. Stored data then was much smaller and wouldn't take forever.