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Inventor of GMR Bids To Shake Up Storage, Again

Posted by kdawson on 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."

8 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Finally... by XenoPhage · · Score: 5, Funny

    Enough space for all the porn in the internet... at least for now. I disagree.. I don't think the Internet has enough space for porn, it seems to keep spilling over into my browser...
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    XenoPhage
    Technological Musings
  2. Anybody bought a hard drive in the last 10 years? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What? All of you? You're all using this man's technology right now. Accusations of this product being vaporware do not account for the man's track record (no pun intended). You should all give this man a little credit, okay?

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    My blog
  3. Awesome! by illegibledotorg · · Score: 5, Funny

    If it means my computer gets to look like that thing from TFA, then I'm SO in!

  4. Re:Anybody bought a hard drive in the last 10 year by geekoid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No. All peoples claims should be approached with a skeptic eye. What I will do is not discard this man as a crackpot immediately. Many men that have created great things also had crackpot ideas.

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    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  5. Library conversion by Per+Wigren · · Score: 5, Funny

    allow every consumer to carry data equivalent to a college library on small portable devices Now, I'm confused. How many College Libraries are there in a Library of Congress?
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    My other account has a 3-digit UID.
  6. Re:Anybody bought a hard drive in the last 10 year by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Funny

    All peoples claims should be approached with a skeptic eye.

    Yeah, right.

  7. At Long Last! by BlackGriffen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They have finally perfected the abacus!

    FTFA:
    "His idea is to stand billions of ultrafine wire loops around the edge of a silicon chip -- hence the name racetrack -- and use electric current to slide infinitesimally small magnets up and down along each of the wires to be read and written as digital ones and zeros.

    His research group is able to slide the tiny magnets along notched nanowires at speeds greater than 100 meters a second. Since the tiny magnetic domains have to travel only submolecular distances, it is possible to read and write magnetic regions with different polarization as quickly as a single nanosecond -- far faster than existing storage technologies."

    What is really really old is new again, eh?

    I can see it now - to erase your iPod, turn it on its side and shake - just like an Etch-a-Sketch!

  8. Fermat Jr.'s Last Theorem by sehlat · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this 50TB hard drive is too small to contain.