IBM creates the world's smallest hard drive

IBM officially entered the "miniature" electronics world with the ambition to create the world's smallest hard drive.

Data storage technology is always trying to create products with smaller sizes. And recently, scientists have made an incredible "leap" with the project to create a 1 nano-sized hard drive using a single atom.

The atom is magnetized, cooled with liquid helium, and stored in an extreme vacuum. In this way, the team stores a single bit of data (a 1 or 0) in an incredibly small space.

Data storage technology is always striving to create products with smaller sizes.

And while the capacity isn't huge, the IBM research team in California says this approach has the potential to create a credit-card-sized drive that could hold the entire 30 million or so songs in an iTunes or Spotify library.

"We conducted this experiment to better understand what would happen if we compressed technological data down to the smallest possible size, just one atom," nanoscientist Christopher Lutz added.

The team used a Nobel Prize-winning scanning tunneling microscope (STM) for the study. This is a non-optical microscope used to observe the surface morphology of solids that works by recording the tunneling current of electrons as a probe scans the surface of the sample. STM is a powerful tool for observing the surface structure of solids with atomic resolution.

In the extreme vacuum environment inside the STM, without any air molecules or other contaminants, scientists were able to efficiently manipulate a single holmium atom.

The microscope also cools the liquid helium, which is crucial for making the reading and writing process more stable. Thanks to the carefully controlled environment, the team was able to accurately read and write two magnetic atoms separated by just 1 nanometer – one millionth the width of a typical needle tip.

With this same microscope, scientists can mimic the operation of a conventional hard drive, delivering an electric current that shifts the magnetic orientation of an atom up or down, but on a much smaller scale.

Cutting down to just one atom is truly a remarkable step forward.

Today, a hard drive typically requires 100,000 atoms to store just 1 bit, so cutting it down to just 1 atom is a huge step forward.

The team is excited that the technique could lead to drives with 1,000 times more storage capacity than the ones we have. And while the process is still too difficult and expensive to bring to market anytime soon, the researchers have seen its feasibility in early attempts.

This is just the latest in a series of data storage innovations – earlier this month, researchers from Columbia University announced they had backed up six digital files onto a single DNA molecule. While there have been many attempts to store data in single atoms, this is the smallest, most stable, and most promising result, according to the IBM team.

“The high magnetic stability combined with electromagnetic reading and writing suggests that single-atom storage is entirely feasible,” the researchers conclude.

The study was published in the journal Nature.

According to Khoahoc.tv