North Carolina State scientist makes chip with 1 Terabit storage (WOW!!!)

And it might be coming to market in "five years or sooner!" according to Dr. Jay Narayan, the thinkin' dude who came up with it.

From the article at Thinq...

Future solid state disks may finally be able to catch up with the large capacities of mechanical hard drives, thanks to an ingenious project by a scientist at the North Carolina State University.

Dr Jay Narayan has developed a silicon storage chip that stores data in magnetic nanodots, or quantum dots; tiny structures that can measure just 6nm in diameter. Each nanoscale dot stores a single bit of data, but you can squeeze so many dots onto a small area of silicon that the university says that a single chip can “store an unprecedented amount of data.”

Dr Narayan says that the technology could enable you to “store over one billion pages of information in a chip that is one square inch.” That’s pages in terms of books, by the way, so how much is this in terms of bits and bytes?

Speaking to Thinq, Dr Narayan explained that "one terabit can store 250 million pages." According to Dr Narayan, "at 10nm per bit, 1cm square stores one terabit." As such, the billion pages would be made up of four square centimetres of silicon, providing four terabits of storage. That's basically 512GB in just one small chip, and you could squeeze in much more data than that if the dots had a diameter of just 6nm.

If this new method overcomes the problems with limited reading/writing that current solid state storage has, in addition to that gads of space... well, that would pretty much be the last hard drive or iPod or whatever that you would ever need (and maybe even want :-)