Salt — table kind — can boost hard drive storage

Salt has served as the foundation for cuisines worldwide and supported the rise of empires throughout human history. Now it represents the special ingredient for creating new computer hard disk drives capable of storing six times more data than existing hard drives. 

Singaporean researchers found that sodium chloride, the formula for table salt, can act as the chemical key for making denser hard drives with "bits" of information stored in single tiny structures. Their breakthrough means that hard drives capable of holding just 1 terabyte of data could someday hold 6 terabytes — about enough music to play continuously for 12 years straight.

"What we have shown is that bits can be patterned more densely together by reducing the number of processing steps," said Joel Yang, a scientist at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering in Singapore. "In addition to making the bits, we demonstrated that they can be used to store data."   More Read