Every time they release a newer, smarter, smaller thumb drive, I keep thinking how much easier it would be to lose it. I can barely keep track of my hefty, palm-sized phone, let alone something actually smaller than the digit it's named for. Smaller technology isn't always better when it comes to those of us who live in chaos. I sort of miss those external hard drives that were the size of cinderblocks if only because I could always tell where the damn things were. But, as if to spite me, IBM has gone ahead and invented a storage device so small it actually can't be seen with the naked eye. They wanted to see exactly how much matter it took to store a single bit of data. They found out it took exactly 12 atoms.

 

Considering the head of a pin can hold about a million atoms, 12 is a very, very small number. The atoms in question were iron atoms, and the storage device used their magnetic properties to convey a very small amount of data. Researchers had to line them up in two rows of six, like an egg carton, in order to get them to stably contain information. 

 

Current hard drives use about a pinhead's worth of atoms per bit, so this new method is at least by the numbers one heck of a lot more efficient. Unfortunately, it's also a lot harder to sustain. The atoms had to hang out in an extremely low temperature environment and data could only be written using a scanning tunneling microscope. Not exactly something that would fit neatly onto your desk. Especially not with that clutter. Gosh. 

 

As you might imagine, it'd be pretty tricky to build a whole hard drive on these tiny storage devices. IBM isn't exactly jumping at the bit to start rolling these guys out in next year's line of computers. But it does open up our ideas of what is possible when it comes to writing and storing data. The closer we get to this sort of scale, the more likely we'll be to eventually accomodate larger and larger swaths of collective information as the sea of content in the world grows. We're already pretty darn efficient, with whole libraries sitting in our pockets, but our capacity to collect will only get larger as more data enters the collective consciousness. Pretty soon it'll be time to start lining our pockets with multiverses.