Inventor of GMR Bids To Shake Up Storage, Again

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @08:21AM from the dark-horse-in-search-of-a-racetrack dept.

Nrbelex writes "Stuart S. P. Parkin, an I.B.M. research fellow largely unknown outside a small fraternity of physicists, thinks he is poised to bring about a breakthrough that could increase the amount of data stored on a chip or a hard drive by a factor of a hundred. This is the man who pioneered exploiting the giant magnetoresistance effect in the 90s, causing disk storage to jump ahead of the Moore's Law curve. If he proves successful in developing 'racetrack memory,' he will create a universal computer memory, one that can potentially replace DRAM and flash memory chips, and make a 'disk drive on a chip' possible. It could begin to replace flash memory in three to five years, scientists say."

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Storage leaps by CopaceticOpus · 2007-09-11 09:06 · Score: 4, Interesting

Imagine the social implications of the $50 5TB thumb drive...

"I was over at Jimmy's house yesterday and asked him to put some good stuff on my thumb drive. He gave me HD copies of the top 80 movies released in the past two years, plus 2000 of his favorite albums.

Meanwhile, a second thumb drive I keep clipped to my belt has been keeping an audio/video recording of the last 17 months of my life, nonstop."