sennekuyl wrote:If I understood you correctly, they already can.

No, I meant a single atom for each 1 or 0 (referring to Twistor's answer that 1 would do for him).

sennekuyl wrote:It is just the mechanism to read and write is about the size of at least a kitchen table.

Aye. Takes me back, that does. I remember when the storage media was the size of a washing machine, and the printers a single decker bus.

Try getting those in your pocket.

Scot Dutchy wrote:I can remember how much memory it was.

You can, or you can't? I can't, but I know it was not as much as my phone now has.

Oh, this prototype read/write system is impressive, but it'll even more impressive if they can miniaturise it to the point where the read-write system will fit into, say, a matchbox. A solid state hard drive the size of a matchbox, storing an exabyte of data or more, will really be something special.

Knowing somebody who is a grad student at another of the "elite physics laboratories" engaged in the international race allows me to give their entirely unofficial reaction to this: "Meh!" And bit more profound: "It retains data for how long?" and "at what temperature did they do it?", basically the main issues with making data storage smaller.

susu.exp wrote:Knowing somebody who is a grad student at another of the "elite physics laboratories" engaged in the international race allows me to give their entirely unofficial reaction to this: "Meh!" And bit more profound: "It retains data for how long?" and "at what temperature did they do it?", basically the main issues with making data storage smaller.

Those were basically my two questions upon reading this as well. Like I said, scientists have already found that some materials hold magnetic charge on a molecular level, but its at only a few degrees Kelvin and for very short periods of time. I was hoping they had somehow overcome those limitations, but not sure.

I understood that the storage was stable at 12 atoms, but had to be <5K

From Ars:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/201 ... e-zero.ars

What's the current state of the art with respect to 'high temperature' superconductors? Only it sounds to me as if we're dealing with a superconducting type phenomenon in this instance ...

>180K and it breaks down, I believe. Though that would have been an Ars Technica or Popular Science article that I surmised that number from, so it is probably much better than that.