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100x Faster Hard Drive In Lab
Gary lets us know about research out of the Netherlands that has succeeded in reading and writing a hard disk using polarized laser light. The researchers claim this offers a 100-times speedup over reading/writing using magnets. People have been trying for years to write data using polarized light; the secret of the current work's success lies in its disk's materials — gadolinium, iron, and cobalt. Working prototype drives should be available within a decade.
...to the original publication.
the really fascinating thing is not THAT they succeeded to change the magnet field via lasers, it's the speed if you compare their figures to this
> Hard Disks are old news...no one is going to be using them in 5 years, let alone 10...flash is so the way forward
Probably not in the notebook/desktop consumer market, but I can imagine enterprise/research uses for magnetic HDDs where read/write times are less important and $/GB much more so.
That said, if I'm right, laser-based magnetic storage being faster than current tech won't really matter for that kind of scenario.