Scientists at IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science have built the world's smallest unit of magnetic storage, using just 96 atoms to create one byte of data. Conventional drives require a half a billion atoms for each byte.

The advance could lead to tiny hard drives able to store 200 to 300 times more information than they can today. Just imagine an iPod Touch that held 12.8 terabytes of music.


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