NEW SCIENTIST: Icy hard drives cram 5300 movies onto a postage stamp

Description

The best way to put your photos on ice is to freeze them. Extremely cold molecules could soon hold hundreds of times more data than existing hard drives.

By controlling the magnetism of individual molecules, Nick Chilton and his colleagues at the University of Manchester in the UK have shown that it may be possible to create hard drives that store more than 30.8 terabits of data per square centimetre. That’s about 5300 full-length movies squeezed into a hard drive that’s just a bit bigger postage stamp.