Yes. The maximum possible amount of data you can cram into a given space is the.
So what does that translate to? Well, the E is actually mass-energy. But assuming your storage device is a spherical thing that has mass, the number of bits you can store is around (2.57*10^43)*(mass of your storage device in kg)*(radius of your storage device in m).
How does this compare to the best modern storage technology? The densest data storage we have today is DNA storage, which can now manage up to(We won’t use DNA storage in computers anytime soon, because getting the data back out of storage takes a very long time). A gram of dry DNA is about so the radius is 0.0062 meters.
So, the best DNA storage can do with those dimensions is 5.6*10^15 bits.
A Bekenstein-bound storage device with those dimensions would store about 1.6*10^38 bits.
Oh, but we can get closer to the Bekenstein bound if we get sillier than that! For completeness’s sake, I should mentionThis uses a technique I won’t pretend to understand to make an electron act like it has multiple wavelengths at the same time, allowing you to store 35 bits on a single electron!
So, how big is an electron? That’s actually hard to say. It’s usually best to treat an electron as a point particle. But experimentally, we know that its radius isUsing that radius, a Bekenstein-bound storage device the size of an electron would actually store 66 million bits.
As ridiculously high as that is, the gap between that and an electronic quantum holography setup is much narrower than the gap than between that and DNA storage. So why am I not calling electronic quantum holography the best we can do for storage? Because you can’t actually make it work with a spherical blob of electrons. They’ve gotta be orbiting atoms to avoid interfering with each other and destroying the information you tried to store. And I have neither the chemistry nor the geometry expertise to figure out how many silver atoms you could pack into a sphere and still be able to read off from their electrons.
I was going to compare this to modern commercial storage technology, but that would require modeling our storage unit as a sphere. And I refuse to type the words “assume a spherical hard drive in a vacuum.”
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