Technabob » capacity http://technabob.com/blog Cool Gadgets, Gizmos, Games and Geek Stuff Sun, 27 May 2012 17:30:28 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 The Secret to Multiplying Hard Drive Capacity is Salt, Not Pepper http://technabob.com/blog/2011/10/17/increasing-hard-drive-capacity/ http://technabob.com/blog/2011/10/17/increasing-hard-drive-capacity/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:00:53 +0000 Conner Flynn http://technabob.com/blog/?p=70605 We all love salt on our food, even though too much is not good for you. Salt makes everything better. Even hard drives apparently. And that’s good news given all of the things we are storing on our devices.

hard drive x ray flickr jeff kubina
Scientists in Singapore are looking at a way to increase hard drive capacity by using salt. Plain old table salt in fact. Right now your hard drive works by spinning magnetic platters covered in random nanoscopic grains, which come in disorganized clumps of tens to form one bit of data. The latest drives hold up to 500 gigabits of data in every square inch. That’s not bad, but there may be a better way.

This latest idea gets rid of those random clumps and decides to instead make larger grains (ten nanometers, up from seven to eight nanometers), in regular patterns, which each store one bit. A spokesperson from Singapore’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering likens it to packing your clothes in a suitcase. The neater you pack it all in, the more it can carry.

They use an e-beam lithography process that produces fine nano-scale structures for the discs and when sodium chloride is added to the developer solution, they found that they could create nanostructures with a higher resolution: down to 4.5 nanometers half pitch, without overly expensive equipment. In the end, this salty process could allow for anywhere from 1.9TB to 3.3TB per square-inch, a substantial increase from today’s capacities.

[via Wired]

]]> http://technabob.com/blog/2011/10/17/increasing-hard-drive-capacity/feed/ 0 Timeless Watch Seamlessly Integrates a Hidden USB Drive http://technabob.com/blog/2008/08/08/timeless-watch-seamlessly-integrates-a-hidden-usb-drive/ http://technabob.com/blog/2008/08/08/timeless-watch-seamlessly-integrates-a-hidden-usb-drive/#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:30:48 +0000 Karen M. http://technabob.com/blog/?p=3436 The Timeless Watch seamlessly integrates a hidden usb drive that also serves as the watch’s clasp. Unlike other watches that hide a separate, detachable flash drive, this one is attached to the watch strap.

watch1

The watch was designed by Ondrej Vaclavik. It’s designed to be lightweight and require no batteries, as the watch would charge via the USB.

watch

It’s not available for sale yet, so there’s no word on the capacity of the USB drive or what have you, but I suppose you could rig one up yourself out of some spare parts. Although, I’m guessing that unless you’re extremely talented it would look really crappy.

watch4

You can see more pictures (but no written information as far as I can tell) at Ondrej Vaclavik’s site.

[via DesignBoom]

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