“Mobile phones, iPods and other consumer devices may soon be able to hold a hundred times more information than they do at present thanks to a breakthrough in storage technology,” Jonathan Richards reports for The Times Online.

“Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage which would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs – or 3,500 films – and cost far less to produce,” Richards reports.

“In a paper published in the current issue of Science, a team at the company’s research centre in San Jose, California, said that devices which use the new technology would require much less power, would run on a single battery charge for ‘weeks at a time,’ and would last for decades,” Richards reports.

“So-called ‘racetrack’ memory uses the ‘spin’ of an electron to store data, and can operate far more quickly than regular hard drives… it can ‘write data’ – or store information – extremely quickly, and does not have the ‘wear out’ mechanism,” Richards reports.

“At present the most capacious iPod – the 160GB iPod Classic – can store 40,000 songs,” Richards reports.

“IBM said the technology was still “exploratory” at this stage, but that it expected devices which used it to be on the market within ten years,” Richards reports.

Full article here.