Singaporean scientists have perfected a technique of making nano structures that will allow the development of hard drives of up to 21 terabytes (TB) storage capacity using ordinary salt.

Joel Yang, a scientist at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering at Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research, has announced that he and his team of researchers from the National University of Singapore and the Data Storage Institute made the breakthrough in bit patterning or nanopatterning technique using the "salty developer solution," which he invented when he was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The salt solution allows the outline of bits or nanostructures that hold information to be seen clearly so it can be arranged in neater patterns. In current hard disk drives, bits are arranged randomly.

The electron beam lithography process used in making circuitry in hard drives can create circuitry about 25 nanometres (nm) in width, which is 3,000 times less thicker than a human hair.

With Yang's method, circuitry as small as 4.5 nm can be created allowing more bits of data to be closely packed together to the tune of 1.9TB per inch to 3.3TB per inch. In contrast, a 4TB Seagate hard drive only packs bits at 625 gigabytes per inch.

Applying Yang's method in the current production process will theoretically create a hard drive with up to 21TB storage capacity.