IT abroad: IBM creates world’s smallest magnetic storage device

IBM Corp. has announced about the major breakthrough in the field of data storage. After five years of work, its researchers have succeeded in reducing from about one million to 12 the number of atoms required to create a bit of data.

In the future the breakthrough may allow data storage hardware manufacturers to make products with capacities that are orders of magnitude greater than today's hard disk and flash drives.

Andreas Heinrich, IBM Research Staff Member and lead investigator on this project, says that if you look at this development conservatively instead of 1TB on a device you’d have 100TB to 150TB.

According to IBM, the technology could also someday be applied to tape media.