Scientists from the Dutch Technical University of Delft today announced they've developed the smallest hard disk drive ever. The disk has a density 500x higher than HDDs currently available, which means all books even written by humankind can fit on the HDD that's the size of a stamp.
The scientists report that the disk has a capacity of 502 terabits per square inch which is possible because each bit is made up of a single chlorine atom.
The single layer of chlorine atoms is laid out on a surface of copper atoms and the way reading and writing works can be compared to a sliding puzzle. The atoms are moved around using a special scanning tunneling microscope which scans each atom one by one. An empty spot is considered a 0 and a spot that contains a chloride atom is considered a 1.
The atomic HDD from the Dutch University isn't ready for consumers yet, it currently only functions in a vacuum and cooled at -196 Celsius. Besides that, it's also very slow, reading a block of 8x8 bits takes about a minute and writing the same block takes about 3 minutes.
