"Data Storage Breakthrough Could Store the Library of Congress on a Dust Mite"

"Using this new data storage technique, you could fit the entire Library of Congress on a cube smaller than a dust mite—or the size of George Washington's pupil on a one dollar bill."

"A team of Nanoscientists led by Sander Otte at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has just unveiled the densest method ever developed to store re-writable digital data. By scooting around individual chlorine atoms on a flat sheet of copper, the scientists could write a 1 kilobyte message at 500 terabits per square inch."

There's downsides to Otte's method. It may be a dense way to store data, but it's also heartbreakingly slow. Reading a few short sentences on one of the copper blocks takes around 1 to 2 minutes, and writing them takes 10. But Otte's team is investigating new methods they believe could speed up their writing and readout speeds by an incredible amount, up to about 1 megabit per second, about a tenth as fast as the average U.S. computer downloads data online."