Time For Liquid Hard Drive

With this new technology you can easily store your data in a liquid hard drive. Scientists have proven it again that the future of technology will be jaw dropping and awestrucking

What if you could now store all your data in a tablespoon of liquid? This is going to be true in coming years. The researchers are developing a technology through which you can save your data in liquids. The researchers have created clusters of colloidal particles (spheres) in a liquid that is able to be manipulated in such a way as to represent different states such as “0” or “1” thereby suggesting a novel way to store large amounts of data in a small amount of liquid. They have named this “soft matter” . The team behind the liquid hard drive, led by Sharon Glotzer and David Pine, used a type of colloidal suspension of specially designed dimpled nanoparticles.

According to them, the soft matter holds a potential as a digital colloid for possible data storage in the future. The best part of these particles is that they do not settle and therefore remain distributed throughout the second substance and hence are able to retain their properties. In their lab, the researchers created a single entity consisting of four spheres clustered around a single sphere on the scale of approximately 5 µm—representing the most basic state, one capable of representing either a “0” or a “1”, i.e. a digital colloid. The team notes that capacity could be increased by increasing the size of clusters. Such clusters, the team suggests, represent the possibility of small amounts of liquid, holding very large amounts of information—a terabyte of data in just a single tablespoon, for example.

But still they haven’t figured it out how to extract the data stored in the liquid. But the group suggests digital colloids might be useful in soft robotics or perhaps they may add to variety of ways.

By Rohan Pal