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1 Terabyte Thumb Drives a Reality in 18 Months

By Robert | October 29, 2007

We have some very exciting news heading our way from Boffins at the Arizona University. They have created a new process that makes it possible to manufacture high capacity memory that is both low cost and energy efficient. When speaking about high capacity memory we actually mean that there is a possibility to build a perfectly working terabyte thumb drive. We thus have a new technology that will be based on a special memory standard. The best thing about it is that price is reduced to one tenth of the regular cost we currently notice in flash memory and appears to be around 1000 times more energy efficient.

The team that is actually behind the project is ASU’s Center for Applied Nanoionics and the company’s director, Michael Kozicki, declared that the limitations we currently see with portable electronic storage could disappear. He declared himself happy at the possibility of video recording any moment in one’s life and having the means to effectively store all the video. We thus have a new procedure named PMC (programmable metallization cell) technology and everybody is thinking about the possibility of it being more stable than the flash memory alternative.

PMC works by creating nanowires made out of copper atoms that simply store binary ones and zeros. This is opposed to the regular storage method that holds such binary information as an electronic charge. It looks like the first product that will be built around PMC will appear in around 18 months and that deadline could mark the end of flash based memory as we know it at the moment. Just imagine being able to hold 1 terabyte of information in a compact thumb drive, similar to that of flash sticks, plug it into any computer and save as much as you can. 1 TB is definitely a lot for such a small storage device.

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