A new material for high density data storage can be erased and recycled in a more efficient and sustainable way, offering a potential lower-energy alternative to hard disk drives, solid-state drives and flash memory in future. The low-cost polymer stores data as ‘dents’, making a miniscule code in patterns, with the indents just nanometers in size – promising to store more data than typical hard disk drives. The information in the polymer can be wiped in seconds by short bursts of heat and be reused several times.
www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1068605