The past few decades have witnessed a race towards developing smaller, faster, cheaper and ultra high capacity data storage technologies. In particular, this race has been accelerated due to the emergence of the internet, consumer electronics, big data, cloud based storage and computing technologies. The enormous increase in data is paving the path to a data capacity gap wherein more data than can be stored is generated and existing storage technologies would be unable to bridge this data gap. A novel approach could be to shift away from current two dimensional architectures and onto three dimensional architectures wherein data can be stored vertically aligned on a substrate, thereby decreasing the device footprint. This thesis explores a data storage concept based on vertically aligned cylindrical magnetic nanowires which are promising candidates due to their low fabrication cost, lack of moving parts as well as predicted high operational speed. In the proposed concept, data is stored in magnetic nanowires in the form of magnetic domains or bits which can be moved along the nanowire to write/read heads situated at the bottom/top of the nanowire using spin polarized current. Cylindrical nanowires generally exhibit a single magnetic domain state i.e. a single bit, thus for these cylindrical nanowire to exhibit high density data storage, it is crucial to pack multiple domains within a nanowire. This dissertation demonstrates that by introducing compositional variation i.e. multiple segments along the nanowire, using materials with differing values of magnetization such as cobalt and nickel, it is possible to incorporate multiple domains in a nanowire. Since the fabrication of cylindrical nanowires is a batch process, examining the properties of a single nanowire is a challenging task. This dissertation deals with the fabrication, characterization and manipulation of magnetic domains in individual nanowires. The various properties of are investigated using electrical measurements, magnetic microscopy techniques and micromagnetic simulations. In addition to packing multiple domains in a cylindrical nanowire, this dissertation reports the current assisted motion of domain walls along multisegmented Co/Ni nanowires, which is a fundamental step towards achieving a high density cylindrical nanowire-based data storage device.