'Racetrack' Memory Could Replace Hard Drives?

Galactic_grub writes "An experimental new type of memory that uses nanosecond pulses of electric current to push magnetic regions along a wire could dramatically boost the capacity, speed and reliability of storage devices. Magnetic domains are moved along a wire by pulses of polarized current, and their location is read by fixed sensors arranged along the wire. Previous experiments have been disappointing, but now researchers have found that super-fast pulses of electricity prevent the domains from being obstructed by imperfections in the crystal."

Comments

Re:Anything

[Silver Sloth]

Anything would be better than the current way my hard drive works You mean a technology that is

• cheap
• reliable - OK, hard drive errors do exist but I wish my car, for example, was as reliable
• standardized - OK, there are a number of standards but not that many

Yes, in the long term I don't see the hard drive as the best method of data storage but the altenatives have a long way to go before they replace it.