The discovery, they said, will allow from 1.9 Tbit/in. to 3.3 Tbit/in. or six times what a Seagate 4TB hard drive has today, which is 625Gb/in. Given that today's hard drives can come with as much as , theoretically, the new technology would allow more than 21TB of data on a single drive.
The secret of the research lies in the use of an extremely high-resolution e-beam lithography, which is the process by which fine nano-sized circuitry is created.
By adding sodium chloride (salt) to a developer solution used in lithography processes, the researchers were able to produce highly defined nanostructures that were as small as 4.5 nanometers (nm), without the need for expensive equipment upgrades.
A nanometer is equal to one-billionth the size of a meter. Today's NAND flash-based solid-state drives use lithography processes that create circuitry about 25nm in width; a human hair is 3,000 times thicker than 25nm.
An example of how nanopatterning more closely packs bits of data together.