Random Accesses

There’s always been an inverse relationship between density and durability when it comes to data storage. Today’s silicon memory chips contain a lot of density, but with a lifespan of just a few decades, they lack durability. Yet primitive forms of storage such as information carved in stone are highly durable, however, they are not dense. Now this long-standing negative correlation between density and durability has been blow to bits with the development of a new memory device that can pack a trillion bits of data into one square inch of medium and retain that data for a billion years.

Led by physicist Alex Zettl, researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, have created a digital electromechanical memory device that consists of a crystalline iron nanoparticle shuttle approximately 1/50,000th the width of a human hair enclosed within the hollow of a multiwalled carbon nanotube. The shuttle can be moved reversibly via a low-voltage electrical write signal and can be positioned with nanoscale precision, forming the basis of a binary sequence.

Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1571