Nanostorage refers to memory storage technology that utilizes nanoscale features. The goal is to offer higher density storage media with new applications. Nanostorage includes MRAM, NRAM, holographic memory, and molecular memory. IBM’s Millipede is an example, but it was likely abandoned. A 2004 report predicted the market would be worth $65.7 billion by 2011.
“Nanostorage” is a rarely used buzzword, as is “nanochip” used to describe some types of memory storage technology that take advantage of features at the nanoscale, or sometimes, the scale of atoms (a silicon atom has a diameter of about 1/10 nanometer). The word is so rarely used that it’s unclear what exactly it refers to, but most of the technologies discussed in the nanochip article also refer to nanostorage. The goal of nanostorage is to make money by offering higher density storage media with new applications. For example, a 100 terabyte storage drive might hold years of video (over 100,000 hours).
The archetypal example of “nanostorage” would be IBM’s Millipede, which used a MEMS (microelectromechanical systems)-based probe that manipulates charge in tiny capacitors to store data. However, despite announcements that the technology would be commercialized in late 2007, the flow of publications ceased in 2006, meaning that the project was likely closed down and the technology abandoned.
“Nanostorage” got some news in 2004 when NanoMarkets LC, a market analysis group, predicted that the nanostorage market would penetrate nearly 40% of the hard drive and memory chip business by 2011, with a value combined of $65.7 billion. The report further said that the technology would be highly disruptive to the disk drive industry because it could fuse data storage capabilities and memory chips, currently distinct devices.
Technologies that fall under the purview of “nanostorage” include MRAM (magnetoresistive random access memory), which its proponents believe has such overwhelming advantages that it has become the dominant new universal memory, NRAM (nano random access memory), which encodes data such as patterns in carbon nanotubes, holographic memory, which would encode data using multiple angles and layers within the same medium, and molecular memory, which is a generic term for anything else that uses single molecules to store data, the which implies a large storage capacity.
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