An animation explaining the mechanism of storing information in the positions of individual atoms, used by Delft scientists to store one kilobyte of data on an area 100 nm x 100 nm in size. Animation made by Stijlbende.

Comments

1. Well,it sounds interessting! However, how realistic is it to build a stable prototype wich will work outside the lab as well? And even if it may be possible, then how long will it take to develop such a "drive" for companies, or even private persons? I mean there are quite a few highly awesome technologies which may, or may not revolutionize the way we look at computers - but they are still far away from the main market.
   
   I mean at one point there was a tesa-tape drive in development at an kind of operational stage, where it could hold an insane amount of data for the time it was shown!... Also quantum computers are still just a thing that randomly pops up now and then - with progress been made, but without a real estimation when we will really see it in a "working" condition. Innovation costs money, also ressources - and if big companies aren't willing to invest in this project - it may be just a "nice try" for now - but mankind will have to go this way anyways sooner or later - we'll see - and I wish the development team good luck!
2. How stable is it?
   Can it stand up to background radiation without problems?
3. If we use atoms as storage, imagine how much bigger capacity hard drives would be today.
4. i was going to make a comment about read write speeds before youtube comments decided to crash repeatedly.
   
   this needs fixed.
5. youtube comments is being super buggy today. refuses to allow me to use a forward slash character at all then crashes the webpage. thanks for nothing google.
6. Looking forward to new harddrives coming with air condition units.
7. How?
8. You are doing a really good job and keep going on of doing such amazing stuff!!
9. NOTE: Please, Whatever you do, do NOT let CrApple steal your idea, and tell the world it was all their idea/invention. That's what CrApple does and extremely good at, by brainwashing and fooling ,......people.  Just WOW, that's freaking unreal. What and how that needle is moving those individual atom. Another words, something has to move that needle to move those atoms around. Will that work kind of like the current type hard drive? Whatever that needle is made out of, is just as important as the technology itself, cause that needle has to work so fast moving all those atoms around and has to be smaller than the atoms to be able to pick each one and move it around, as date coming in and going. its pretty amazing. Maybe at a short distance future, we can have a huge storage on our phones, that does not take any space whatsoever. 10TB space as small as 2mmx2mm in size or something like that, wouldn't that be crazy?
10. store one kilobyte of data on an area 100 nm x 100 nm in size. ??
    1 Kilobyte = 100 Nanometer
    1 Gigabyte = 1e+6 Kilobyte
    1 Gigabyte = 100*1e+6 Nanometer = 1e+8 Nanometer
    1 Meter = 1e-9 Nanometer
    1 Gigabyte = 0.1 Meter = 10 Centimeter ???
11. Just Amazing !!
12. why isn't this on CNN? this is the kind of stuff that matters most than hillary and trump.
13. 1:04, what are lie!
    it has been discovered that chlorine is forming c2x2 adlayer phase on Cu(100) for many years already!
14. Holy shit!
15. 1:57 "a full kilobyte, comprising 8,000 atomic bits" ???
16. Pretty cool to think I'll most likely see Petabyte-class drives not only in my lifetime, but the fairly near future.
17. Great job!!
18. Hopefully this won't be the new graphene, always just around the corner from being commercially ready.
19. Awesome!! Maybe now i can store all my life in this memory. :D
20. Great job! To every scientist involved: It is people like you that help humanity make progress. Thank you!