By Roland Piquepaille
When we hear about ever-increasing disk storage capacity, we usually read about new engraving technologies. Not here. Charles Choi has the story.New, tiny magnetic sensors could help break a technical barrier to ushering in the next generation of computer disk storage capacity, researchers reported Friday.
The sensors, filaments of nickel thinner than a wavelength of visible light, are capable of detecting extremely weak magnetic fields.
Although it is already possible to increase hard drive storage capacity many times, the process has lagged because technology has not existed to read the data signals, researcher Harsh Chopra, a materials scientist at the State University of New York in Buffalo, told United Press International.
Here comes the fascinating part of the article.
In findings to be published in next July's issue of the journal Physical Review B, Chopra and physicist Susan Hua described sensors they have developed that are both small and sensitive to improve the density of hard drives.
The sensors are actually microscopic whiskers of nickel only a few atoms wide. Each of the filaments can read infinitesimal magnetic fields and at room temperature can detect a 100,000 percent change in voltage.
For comparison, he explained, imagine normal magnetic sensors can read a signal that begins with a strength of 1 and swings between an "off" reading at 0.8 and "on" at 1.2. The new sensors can read a range that swings between minus 1000 and plus 1000. That degree of sensitivity means terabits of data -- or trillions of bits -- could be crammed into a square inch of disk space.
Don't expect to see these devices anytime soon: "The normal cycle for [such technologies] from discovery to implementation is about six to eight years," Chopra said.
Source: Charles Choi, United Press International, February 3, 2003
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