The last week has proved that anyone who believes today’s technology is out of date almost from the moment you get it out of the box was never more right than in 2008.

IBM very recently announced Racetrack memory, which the company claims could see us storing up to 3,500 movies or a half a million songs on our MP3 players. Take 14 tracks as being average for an album and it works out as 35,714 albums and 100 times more than is possible today (or should we say was possible last week?) with far less cost and power consumption.

Not only that but IBM say it could be a reality in as little as a decade.

The technology combines both the high performance and reliability of flash with the low cost and high capacity of a hard disk drive. No moving parts mean it’s also going to be more durable. Pretty cool stuff, right?

Perfectly satisfied with this announcement we were a little surprised to hear that less than a week later a team of scientists from a University in Glasgow had gone one step further.

Instead of using the Racetrack methods employed by the IBM researchers (the data races around microscopic magnetic tracks), scientists from Glasgow University are developing a molecular switch technology that enables substantial storage increases without requiring a larger microchip size.

The scientists believe that their break through could see the number of transistors per chip increase from 200 million over a billion.

Dr Lee Cronin and Dr Malcolm Kadodwala’s work (which was unveiled in Nature Nanotechnology) could mean devices with capacities of up to 500,000GB, 100,000 times that of today’s MP3 players or, iPods with pointlessly vast amounts of memory aside, devices the size of a mobile phone capable of storing as much as the most powerful PC.

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