What uses of table salt can you think of? Cooking mainly.. well to your very surprise, the same salt we take in for providing our bodies with necessary iron and to enhance the taste of our food, is now found to increase and expand the capacity of computer’s hard drives too.. Amazing isn’t it?
Scientists in Singapore have discovered this new aspect of salt which will help coping with the ever increasing demand of main memory for storing data.
The discovery credit is held by Singapore’s National Research Institution, the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, in collaboration with the National University of Singapore and the Data Storage Institute.
This new process of manufacturing hard drives using sodium chlorides offers six times the capacity of equivalent, unsalted hard drives.
According to a statement issued recently, scientist observed that the newly developed process is capable of enhancing the data storing capacity of hard drives to 3.3 Tera bytes per square inch, which is thrice that of the ones in use already.
The use of sodium chloride made the patterns of the units of information, i.e. bits, to be done more neatly allowing greater of them to be crowded in. It improved the resolution of the electron beam which acts as a printing agent for bits.
The pattern of bits used to be quite blur and blobby, in spite of trying to print them as neatly as possible. This technique now gives a higher contrast and the pattern lines now are quite visible, says the team lead; Dr. Joel Yang.
The idea will be commercialized when the techniques currently being used, prove inadequate and the manufacturers need to search for alternate methods. The team is expecting it to hit the market not before 2016.
