TDK HAMR: Rub A Little Salt For 18TB Of Data Storage

Gigabytes don't do it anymore for us and data is ever-increasing, but are the hard drives delivering? The maximum memory one could squeeze out of a single hard-drive maxes out to 3TB currently. TDK's HAMR Head Innovation, which uses laser to double hard drive capacity fizzes out at 6TB. Though a recent discovery by a Dr Joel Yang at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) has tripled that number. Dr Yang has devised a way to increase the data density of a drive to 3.3 Terabit/inch², more or less meaning 18TB hard drives could exist.



Simply astounding? It gets better. What is more amazing is that this discovery was fueled by the simplest and most common of substances, table salt or sodium chloride. Simple Science here, the data stored on a hard drive is done so using  nanoscopic magnetic grains. Several of these form a cluster each measuring around 7nm, which stores one bit of information. The more dense the package, the more storage available.

Now, by adding the ingredient that is salt, what one achieves is a single 10nm storing one bit of information. Mathematically, that's one 10nm replacing several 7nm of clusters, equating to more space, for more data. If sources are to be believed, this whole process can be practically accomplished and its availability for commercial hard-drives is not a distant dream.

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