According to the researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and Harvard University, barium titanium oxide nanowires suspended in water could hold 12.8 million GB per square centimeter. If the memory density can be realized commercially, "a device the size of an iPod nano could hold enough MP3 music to play for 300,000 years without repeating a song or enough DVD quality video to play movies for 10,000 years without repetition," the University of Pennsylvania said in a statement.

The researchers are using water to stabilize and control ferroelectricity in the wires, thereby pushing and pulling on atoms in the wires -- which are about three-billionths of a meter wide -- and influencing how those atoms line up.

Jonathan Spanier, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Drexel, and a lead researcher on the project, cautioned that there is still an "enormous" amounts of research to be completed. But he said the technology is promising.

"Hopefully, this will give us a fresh perspective on how we might be able to store information. If there is a demand ... perhaps we can take small steps toward staggeringly larger storage density," Spanier said in an interview.

One limitation with today's tape and disk magnetic storage is that the basic component is a magnetic domain that is not stable at molecular levels. "The magnetization will spontaneously flip back and forth because of [temperature] fluctuations," Spanier said.