Salt, the same one you use for salads, meats and all sorts of food, has a technological application that nobody imagined. It can be used to increase the density of hard drives used in computers today. The discovery was made by a group of scientists from the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering of Singapore, led by Joel Yang. But before you think you just open and play an HD salt to increase its capacity, know that is far more complicated than that.
(a) - surface with 1.9 TB per square inch (b) - surface with 3.3 TB per square inch
The magnetic disks of a hard drive are made of aluminum or a combination of glass and ceramics, and in both cases they get a thin magnetic layer on the surface. It is this layer where they are read, written and stored data. What Yang was discovered that adding sodium chloride solution used in the process of creating this layer, called lithography, it was possible to create magnetic structures even smaller than before, reaching the scale of nanometers.
Thus, with smaller structures occupying the same surface, a disk may have multiplied its storage without the need for a new technology and without having to add more hard disk drives. In tests of the team they were able to multiply the Yang space an HD 1 TB to 6 TB using this technique.
How is the early stages of research, the technique still needs to be improved before being implemented. But Yang ensures that your technique does not require any major change in the current infrastructure of the manufacturers of HD, which ensures that we will see in future higher-capacity drives costing the same price or even less than at present.
