Scientists in Canada have created a hard drive so dense it could hold store every single song on iTunes on a disc the size of a coin.
The solid-state drive, developed at the University of Alberta, can store 1000 times as much data as presently available commercial drives.
"Essentially, you can take all 45 million songs on iTunes and store them on the surface of one quarter," says Roshan Achal, PhD student and lead researcher.
"Five years ago, this wasn't even something we thought possible."
The new drive even works at real-world temperatures. Previous atomic-scale drives only functioned properly if they were supercooled.
"Our memory is stable well above room temperature and precise down to the atom," says Mr Achal, who is working with a company called Quantum Silicon to bring it to market.
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"With this last piece of the puzzle now in hand, atom-scale fabrication will become a commercial reality in the very near future," says Quantum Silicon boss and University of Alberta physics professor Robert Wolkow.
The new technology was revealed in journal Nature Communications.
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