To put that into perspective, the largest capacity single SSD available to consumers in the M.2 form factor is 8TB. It would take 125,000 of them to store the same amount of data as a single diamond wafer, or 1 million 1TB SSDs.
Here’s the other staggering number to digest—2 inches (around 55 millimeters), which is the size of the diameter of these wafers. Saga University researchers collaborated with Adamant Namiki Precision Jewelry company on the breakthrough storage tech, which contains no more than 3 ppb (parts per billion) of nitrogen atoms.
“In this diamond crystal growth technology, nitrogen gas had to be used to obtain a high growth rate, so nitrogen impurities with a concentration of several ppm were mixed into the diamond crystal and could not be used in a quantum computer,” the researchers explain (via Google Translate). “On the other hand, commercially available ultra-high-purity diamonds with a nitrogen concentration of 3 ppb or less have dimensions of only 4 mm square, and even if they could be used for research, they could not be used practically.”
They got around this roadblock by using a unique step flow method, to achieve a higher level of purity. This in turn allowed them to make a wafer significantly larger than 4mm (but still small in the grand scheme of things).
