Get a Bigger Storage Capacity by Adding Water

An article on NanoTechWire explained the possibilities in the future of Hard Drives and other storage mediums holding much more data than what is possible now. With the help of Water, scientists in Drexel found out, in the future our Hard Drive might be able to be “so dense that a cubic centimeter contains 12.8 million gigabytes (GB) of information.”

It could be so huge that even an iPod can continue playing music for 100 millennia without repeating a single song. A USB thumb-drive might also have room for 32.6 million full-length DVD movies in the future.

And how are all these possible? This could actually be achieved by “combining a computing principle that was popular in the 1960s, a glass of water and wire three-billionths of a meter wide.”

Below is the excerpt from the article that explains how all these are possible, from a Scientific perspective:

“Ferroelectric materials possess spontaneous and reversible electric dipole moments. Until recently, it was technologically difficult to stabilize ferroelectricity on the nano-scale. This was because the traditional process of screening the charges was not completely effective. However Jonathan Spanier from Drexel University and his research colleagues have proposed a new and slightly unusual mechanism stabilizing the ferroelectricity in nano-scaled materials: surrounding the charged material with fragments of water.

All ferroelectric materials, even Spanier’s wires that are 100,000 times finer than a human hair, need to be screened to ensure their dipole moments remain stable. Traditionally this was accomplished using metallic electrodes, but Spanier and his team found that molecules such as hydroxyl (OH) ions, which make up water, and organic molecules, such as carboxyl (COOH), work even better than metal electrodes at stabilizing ferroelectricity in nano-scaled materials, proving that sometimes water and electricity do mix.”

Read the full story at NanoTechWire.

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