I can see the comedy potential for using the first letter of the base name followed by ‘its’. Base three would have been right up the Register’s street. Unfortunately, ternary (or trinary) digits appear to be called trits. This leaves us with the unflattering quatrits. After that, it most certainly should be quits.

That makes it a two-bit storage device. Must be Maxtor…

not many dead

It all sounds a bit like an excuse-of-the-day calendat item to me really.... "No, no, we need to control the chirality by annealing the magnetic disk to an anti-ferromagnetic one" Yeah, that'll work.

Despite the obvious hyperbole of the press release (which deserved a ribbing); a potential doubling of storage capacity?

I wouldn’t sniff at that with a teenage "yeah, right, whatever, we can hardly wait".

Quaternary digits aren't really that silly and whimsical. Living organisms have persisted quite successfully in managing the equivalent of terabytes of information in their DNA, which is stored in quaternary format. Or: ATGC.

They could also be used in computing simply as multiple bits. Why would the computer need to know it bits were stored in quaternary format, so long as the data comes back whole?

The anti-science bias at the Reg is even worse than the US Republican Party.

Notice that The Reg is also a "Global Warming Skeptic". (Not to different from the anti-evolution/creationist/intelligent-design cousins)

I seem to remember in an episode of Voyager, they referred to an unspecified volume of data called a TeraQuad! Clearly they should call this new method a Quad, not a Qit!

Man thats sad.

First off, I know you're trolling Pascal - that was funny.

But Doug, come on dude! The tone of the article was due to the comparison between little magnetic thingies on tiny discs and huge fucking rip-your-house-to-pieces-and-send-them-to-Oz tornadoes, not because (for instance) Flash memory doesn't use multibit cells, because it does (oh, and <ahem> DNA too of course). Anti-science? Hardly.

Good to see the author's bullshit detector is still working because Ted's failed in the cold weather on Monday.

Ok, so the real science is a little interesting, but it still sounds played-up.

"We stuck a plastic plate to a magnetic one and it allowed us to control the field states better."

"We now have 4 possible states per storage cell, but because it's so tiny and fiddly it'll still be 1 bit, with protection against data corruption."

"We know it's less of a 'tornado' and more of a 'donut', but the marketing guys really wanted to name the next storage line Tornado so here we are."

They're all words (except for qits being spelled different) up to dits:

Mits, bits, tits, qits, pits, hits, sits, nits and dits.

Then there's:

Mytes, bytes, tytes, qytes, pytes, hytes, sytes, nytes and dytes.

Let's hope the firmware is not created by Seagate.....