Hard drive technology advance

[Bob Barr]

While I don't know how commercially-viable this process might be at this point, it would appear to be a rather remarkable breakthrough in hard disk technology. Definitely something to keep an eye on for the future.

Laser boffins blast bits onto hard drive at 200Gb/sec

Superheating drives forego magnetic write heads

By Iain Thomson in San Francisco
Posted in Storage, 8th February 2012 00:51 GMT


A team of scientists have published a new way of using heat to store data magnetically, which could increase the speed of hard drives over a hundredfold.

Conventional drives use electromagnetism to selectively change the polarity of points on a drive, representing a one or a zero. But according to research published in Nature Communications [1], the team used a high-powered laser to write data onto a special gadolinium [2] and iron storage unit in a fraction of the time, using much less energy.

“Instead of using a magnetic field to record information on a magnetic medium, we harnessed much stronger internal forces and recorded information using only heat,” said York physicist Thomas Ostler in a statement [3]. “This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes (thousands of Gigabytes) of information per second, hundreds of times faster than present hard drive technology. As there is no need for a magnetic field, there is also less energy consumption.”

Excerpt. Links and more at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02...laser_storage/

[nPromote]

Yes you are right, for this to become popular it should be cost effective. A better and faster access technology for the hard drives is long overdue.

[Chips Fletcher]

I work, among other jobs, in the electronics CEM business (Contract Electronics Manufacturer) and this sounds very feasible. We have been manufacturing some very strange products lately! They say that the only thing holding back electronics progress is the lack of human imagination!

[GMF]

200/GB second... Wow, pretty hefty stuff. Could be very useful for certain servers, but in the only client marked, that would just be overkill. I would be more satisfied if they could get the SSD cheaper. 1€ per GB just does not cut it for me. I still have my Samsung 1TB, which is bay far not full and never had any speed issues.

[jaydeee]

amazing!
hoping it will be in the market very soon... so hard driver will get cheaper and I can afford it then .