New storage research could mean data lifespan of 1 billion years!

By any stretch of the imagination, today's data densities are amazing! Today it is possible to store 10 to 100 gigabits of data per square inch on today's memory cards. That is a huge amount of data by any standard. Of course this technology comes at a price. Because of it's density today's data has an estimated life expectancy of only 10 to 30 years. What is even more cause for concern is the fact that even higher storage densities are needed for future electronic devices. That should frighten even the most stalwart of digital storage devotees.

But now researchers are reporting that they are working on a computer memory device that can store thousands of times more data than conventional silicon chips with an estimated lifetime of more than one billion years! This according to an article in ScienceDaily.

The researchers describe development of a memory device consisting of an iron nanoparticle enclosed in a hollow carbon nanotube. In the presence of electricity, the nanoparticle can be shuttled back and forth with great precision. This creates a programmable memory system that, like a silicon chip, can record digital information and play it back. Plus researchers showed that the device had a storage capacity as high as 1 terabyte per square inch (a trillion bits of information) and temperature-stability in excess of one billion years.

read more in the ScienceDaily article

Ultra-Dense Optical Storage -- on One Photon

Researchers at the University of Rochester have made a breakthrough that allows them to encode an entire image onto a photon.

The image was made using a single pulse of light and the team can fit as many as a hundred of these pulses at once into a tiny, four-inch cell.

"It sort of sounds impossible, but instead of storing just ones and zeros, we're storing an entire image," says John Howell, associate professor of physics and leader of the team that created the device, which is revealed in today's online issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. "It's analogous to the difference between snapping a picture with a single pixel and doing it with a
camera"

"You can have a tremendous amount of information in a pulse of light, but normally if you try to buffer it, you can lose much of that information," says Ryan Camacho, Howell's graduate student and lead author on the article. "We're showing it's possible to pull out an enormous amount of information with an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio even with very low light levels."