Researchers in Singapore have found a way to pack six times the data today into future hard disks by basically ordering the structures on the physical drive more neatly – like packing clothes in a suitcase, they say.

Using a materials process known as nano-patterning, they have been able to create arrays of magnetic bits that can potentially store up to 3.3 Terabit per square inch ( Terabit/in²) of data on a hard disk. That is six times the recording density of current devices.

In other words, the same drive you see at Sim Lim Square storing some 1TB today could hold 6TB of data in future by using this new technology from IMRE (Institute of Materials Research and Engineering), which is one of Singapore’s government-funded A*Star research institutes.

Current hard disks use randomly distributed magnetic “grains” – with a few tens of grains to form one bit – to hold about 0.5 Terabit/in² of data. What the Singapore researchers did differently was to order the data into magnetic “islands”, with each one able to store one bit of information. This boosts storage capabilities to 3.3 Terabit/in².

“What we have shown is that bits can be patterned more densely together by reducing the number of processing steps,” said Dr Joel Yang, the scientist at IMRE who headed the project, in a press release last week.

He came up with the “magic” in the entire project – a lithography process that uses salt, or sodium chloride, in the developer solution. This helps create the required nano structures without expensive equipment.

The project is the result of work at IMRE as well as the National University of Singapore and Data Storage Institute. The researchers are looking to pack even more data into hard disks.

The company has smartly hyped up the Zii as something to do with “stem-cell computing”, driving up hits at techie sites by making them guess what Zii actually was.

Unfortunately, a problematic site is surely not the best way to launch such an important chip that is aimed at turning around Creative’s flagging fortunes of late.

What exactly is Zii? We have no real idea. But Creative calls it stem-cell computing. So at first we thought – WOW maybe Creative is moving to the life sciences industry and scored some deal with some big pharmas. But it’s not.

The new system-on-chip, so-called because you can run nice embedded software on it, is expected to be massively scalable, green in terms of power consumption and most importantly, powerful enough for playing rich media.

Called ZMS-05, it appears to be aimed at devices of the future – be it a netbook, cellphone or portable media player – that will handle all the rich media that will come our way.

Creative claims it can scale up from 10Gigaflops to Petaflops (floating point operation per second) in terms of processing power.

Early partners include MSI, of MSI Wind Netbook fame, and as reported by VR-Zone, Creative itself.

Does Sim Wong Hoo have another winner on his hands to turn Creative around once more, as he has done with his accurate bet on MP3 players in the past?

It remains to be seen, of course. But it’s good to see the company going back to R&D to create a niche for itself, after that costly marketing battle with Apple over the by-now commoditised MP3 player market.

At least this effort, out from the geeky corridors of 3DLabs, that expensive graphics chip firm that Creative bought, appears to be some real core IP that the company can use.

But is it another SoundBlaster chip on the cards? Sim will certainly hope so.