Massive Storage of the Future: Imagine The Possibilities

Imagine yourself living ten years from now. You have with you an iPod Nano-like device but instead of simply having 6 Gigabytes of music, it holds 12,500 Terabytes (12,800,000 Gigabytes). So, in your hand, you can store all the movies ever made in DVD-quality with room to spare for all the music ever recorded in CD quality and all the pictures you and your family have ever taken. A far-fetched geek's wet dream?

If the scientists at Drexel University have their way, this may become a reality sooner than we think. They intend to do this using specially treated nano-scaled ferroelectric materials. They claim that data stored on these ferroelectric materials are non-volatile thus data will not be lost even if power is disconnected from their data storage material.

The technology for this is still being studied by scientists so in the meantime, I'll just wait for the first 1 terabyte hard drive so I can start ripping my DVD collection.