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Science & Technology

Scientists build world's smallest hard drive

By T.K. Randall
January 14, 2012 · Comment icon 25 comments

Image Credit: sxc.hu
The miniscule hard drive is comprised of just 96 atoms and can store one byte of data.
IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science built the drive as part of their development of smaller and higher capacity hard drives that could one day store several hundred times the amount of data of their present day counterparts. Conventionally hard drives require half a billion atoms to store one byte of data.
The team assembled the tiny hard drive from the atom up, using a special tool known as scanning tunneling microscope, or STM. They carefully placed atoms into rows of six atoms each. Two rows were enough to store one bit of information. Eight pairs of rows amounted to one byte of data.


Source: Discovery News | Comments (25)

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Recent comments on this story
Comment icon #16 Posted by ~C.S.M~ 13 years ago
what is the world's obsession with making things smaller and smaller and wasting more and more money on useless crap? whatz up with people nowadays labelling everything they dont understand as...useless and waste of money?
Comment icon #17 Posted by ~C.S.M~ 13 years ago
That is what I thought when 5 MB drives came up in the 80s. We are living in times when a single video driver need 30 MB of disk space. One we will all laugh of this....do u remember when video drivers only were 30 mb big? loooool ;-)
Comment icon #18 Posted by badeskov 13 years ago
One we will all laugh of this....do u remember when video drivers only were 30 mb big? loooool ;-) Those were the days Or when they were in kB Cheers, Badeskov PS: One can never get too much HD space
Comment icon #19 Posted by Xanthurion2 13 years ago
whatz up with people nowadays labelling everything they dont understand as...useless and waste of money? what's up with all the people who constantly have to comment on things they think are stupid when they should stop derailing the topic. trust me i completely understand what i'm talking about.
Comment icon #20 Posted by ~C.S.M~ 13 years ago
what's up with all the people who constantly have to comment on things they think are stupid when they should stop derailing the topic. trust me i completely understand what i'm talking about. if you dont like people commenting stupid things, then stop posting stupid things. Easy, no?
Comment icon #21 Posted by Xanthurion2 13 years ago
if you dont like people commenting stupid things, then stop posting stupid things. Easy, no? i don't know. you tell me.
Comment icon #22 Posted by Fluffybunny 13 years ago
what is the world's obsession with making things smaller and smaller and wasting more and more money on useless crap? He types into his computer...which is then communicated across the world on a backbone of high speed data pathways to high tech servers running the forum he contributes to... Perhaps you would like to go back to a string and two dixie cups?
Comment icon #23 Posted by Fluffybunny 13 years ago
Those were the days Or when they were in kB Cheers, Badeskov PS: One can never get too much HD space I remember taking my 386 apart to upgrade it...going to the computer store and sinking ~300.00 for 2 sticks of ram...I think they were a whopping 1028k each. That system flew with 2 megs of ram and a 40 meg hard drive.
Comment icon #24 Posted by badeskov 13 years ago
I remember taking my 386 apart to upgrade it...going to the computer store and sinking ~300.00 for 2 sticks of ram...I think they were a whopping 1028k each. That system flew with 2 megs of ram and a 40 meg hard drive. Scary indeed. An astounding 2MB of ram - amazing what you couldn't do with that back then. Cheers, Badeskov
Comment icon #25 Posted by Abramelin 13 years ago
whatz up with people nowadays labelling everything they dont understand as...useless and waste of money? And then using technology which they also must've once considered useless and a waste of money, lol.
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