'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:I've seen it in fibre before...

[kaszeta]

I remember reading some research a couple of years ago that somethign similar was done using 100km of optical fibre and a router programmed to keep sending the same stuff around the loop, or it could read it/write it as it came around.

The basic technique is even older than that. Google "Mercury Delay Line" for early examples: they'd make a long thin tube of mercury with transponders at each ender. It was around 5 ft per K, IIRC.

Re:I've seen it in fibre before...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mercury delay lines were the cause of a bizarre
computer architecture. The normal form of instructions
had an "address of next instruction" field.

After getting the program to "work", i.e get the correct
answer, the "optimization" stage consisted of working out how
long each instruction would take, and then positioning the "logically next"
instruction at the location just about to appear out of the delay line.

There was no advantage to inner loops that were faster than the
delay round the mercury loop. Unless you could unroll and fit two
repetitions into one trip round.

Of course, all of this was done by hand.