How to fit 1TB of data on one tiny thumbdrive

Only a few years ago, a 512 MB flash drive was a cool item to have. Then the storage capacity kept going up as the price sliding down. Now one can buy 8 GB flash drive less than thirty dollars from many online stores. In a few years, new kind of thumbdrive will be in the market with many times more capacity and cheaper in price in comparison to today's ones. Read the following excerpts:

"Scientists at Arizona State University have created a new kind of solid state memory that they say is much cheaper and more efficient than flash. And crucially, because it uses a new kind of nanotechnology, storage capacities will be much higher than anything we have today, for a tenth of the cost.

The new memory is called programmable metallization cell (PMC) and one terabyte (1TB) USB thumbdrives are said to be just a few years away.

PMC memory works in a vastly different way to current flash technology.

Flash uses electronic charges to physically store bits of information, whereas PMC works on the molecular scale to create nanowires from copper atoms. These nanowires record binary ones and zeroes, enabling a massive amount of data to be stored in a tiny space.

If a positive charge is passed through the PMC memory, the nanowires disassemble, allowing it to be used over and over again."