Research team uses lasers to make hard drives 200 times faster
A new technology could lead to 45 terabyte hard drives that you could fill with data in mere seconds.
When it comes to speedy storage in 2012, most enthusiasts look to solid state drives. Drives like the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS and Patriot Wildfire offer blazing fast performance, but they don’t hold a candle to the new laser-switched storage technology being developed by European researchers.
Today’s mechanical hard drives utilize an electromagnetic head to read and write data to their platters, flipping binary bits from o to 1 and vice versa. With this new system, a laser that fires 60 femtosecond blasts (that’s 0.00006 nanoseconds) at the microscopic magnetic “switches” that store individual bits. Normally, heat and magnetism don’t mix well. When heated beyond a certain point (known as the Curie temperature), permanent magnets lose their magnetism. That’s not the case with the iron-gadolinium alloy used in laser-switched storage.
Instead, as they would in an ordinary hard drive, the ferromagnetic islands (the pillar-shaped things in the digital rendering above) simply change polarity. Team member Thomas Ostler says that this enables data to be recorded at incredible speeds — thousands of gigabytes every second. The process is also much more efficient and could yield substantial power savings anywhere this kind of drive is used, from tablets, Ultrabooks, and desktops to massive data centers.
flipping a bit, laser-style
The only downside at the moment (and a huge hurdle to any kind of commercialization) is that while the system can write data hundreds of times faster than today’s hard drives, that information can’t yet be read — at least not in any practical way. ExtremeTech’s Sebastian Anthony speculates that a scanning tunneling microscope would be up to the task, but they’re still quite large and expensive.
Nevertheless, the groundwork has been laid for yet another giant leap forward in storage technology. With the potential to bring blistering speeds and drives with capacities of 45TB or more, let’s hope the University of York team enjoys continued success in their research.
[Source: University of York via ExtremeTech]
Sounds awsome if you could read the data, i wonder if some type of nanobots might be used that could say reflect light when the
ferromagnetic islands are negative and absorb light when positive, this would alow them to be read by a simple low power beam…just a thought.
OR, how about incorporating some magnetically-influenced molecule that is darker on one side than the other.
i.e. When NORTH is at the top of the island, it is ONE darkness, and when flipped it is the opposite.
Don’t know how fast this flip would take, but it would allow a different laser to reflect a light value off each island without changing the polarity, which would be interpreted as a ONE or ZERO.
Even if the flip was slow, the device would be great for backups that are not re-read immediately.
Come one Materials-enthusiasts. Invent the molecule.
very interesting a giant leap for computers
and blue ray
If you cannot read it..how do you know it is writing