IBM’s Atomic Innovation Makes Your Hard Drive 100,000 Times More Efficient

If you could be 100,000 times more efficient at anything of your choosing, wouldn’t you revolutionize the world?

Well, IBM just accomplished this feat.

They Call It The Atomic Hard Drive

Not to worry, it has nothing to do with mass destruction, but everything to do with storing data.

With the Atomic Hard Drive, IBM has the ability to store a bit of data on a single atom – a task that used to take 100,000 atoms to accomplish.

Generally, things don’t even become visible to the naked eye until they have a width of at least 100,000 atoms, so you can imagine how big of a breakthrough this really is – kind of comparable to writing the entire novel Moby Dick on the head of a needle.

The future is tiny

Maximizing the amount of data storage with respect to space is a pillar of technology’s capabilities.

Thirty years ago, you couldn’t store a single song on a floppy disk. But, advances in data storage gave birth to the iPod and the ability to store hundreds of albums in the palm of your hand.

With the Atomic Hard Drive, researchers say they can store the entire Apple Music catalog on a hard drive the size of a credit card.

Imagine the wireless headphones of the future – no longer needing another device to store or stream music from. Instead, they’ll store every song ever recorded in the headphones themselves, allowing you to browse music history on demand.

And that’s just one use case for this technology. Every device you use today, any object connected to the Internet of Things, and all technology of the future will be empowered by the Atomic Hard Drive...it’s just a matter of time.

So, what’s the secret sauce?

Every atom has a magnetic pole, the same way the Earth has the North and South Pole. Using a microscopic needle, they induce a current to flip the orientation of that magnetic pole.

Depending on which of the atom’s two poles is facing upward, constitutes whether that atom is a 1 or a 0 (that’s the alphabet of data storage, by the way). Then, reading the information is simply a matter of measuring the magnetic current passing through each atom.

Of course, this is all thanks to the Nobel-Prize-winning Scanning Tunneling Microscope which has the ability to view and move singular atoms. Without this massive (and expensive) machine, the Atomic Hard Drive doesn’t exist...so don’t expect this technology to be in the next iPhone.

Advances like this often go unbeknownst to the majority of people until they are in action. But, unraveling this technology gap is what I do with Quick Theories – my weekly newsletter which explains the technology advancements of today, defining their importance to the future.

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