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"Colossal Magnetic Effect" Could Lead To Another Breakthrough In Storage Tech

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the size-matters dept.

Bryant writes "Scientists with the Carnegie Institution for Science have discovered what could bring yet another massive advance in memory and storage. The discovery, a magnetoresistence literally 'up to 1000 times more powerful' than the Giant Magnetoresistence Effect discovered roughly 20 years ago, which led to one of the major breakthroughs in memory, seems to be a result of high-pressure interactions between Manganites. Manganites aren't new to this game; MRAM uses Manganite layers to achieve the Magnetic Tunnel Effect needed to keep the state of memory stable. Applying significant amounts of pressure to known tech-useful materials isn't a new trick; you might recall the recent breakthrough with Europium superconductivity thanks to similar high-pressure antics."

5 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Speed and latency matters by TheLink · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't think I'd be complaining much about huge amounts of cheap storage.

    However I'd complain about low bandwidth and high latency.

    Imagine if you have 100TB drives but they only do sequential transfers at 200MB/sec and are still stuck at about 10milliseconds access time (7200rpm).

    What that means: it'll take 6 days to transfer 100TB at 200MB/sec, and random transfer speeds will be about as crap as now (1-2MB/sec).

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    1. Re:Speed and latency matters by frieko · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I wonder... what if you had a radial strip of GMR heads instead of a single read head? Thermal expansion means you'd still need a "fine tune" coil. It would be like putting an inch ruler next to a centimeter ruler. Only a handful of lines mate up, but give it a tiny bump and you get a whole new set of mates. Splatter large files across the disk. They would read in as a jumble but you could reassemble in cache. Probably crazy but I swear it works great in my head ;)

  2. Re:Storage.... by mea37 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you're thinking home computers, maybe.

    For a lot of businesses, 1TB isn't that much. We have systems with well over 1TB of data, to which over 5GB of new data are added every day, with an accelerating rate of new data coming in (as the systems model more fo the business, in more detail, etc.).

    Historically these scales have only increased over time, and nothing is evident that would show that slowing down any time soon.

    Now, do you want all that storage in one HDD? Probably not; there are pros and cons. But, there are absolutely applications where the desired amount of storage on a device exceeds what you could get today. It's not all about how many movies you can torrent.

  3. It is great but ... by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Should that Giant Magnetoresistive? Someone else seems to so because the article is tagged "typoinsummary". Google and I haven't heard much about Great Magnetoresistive effect in the past, so unless it's some obscure term...

    But hey, it's not my area of expertise and I certainly agree that with the sentiment that this magnetoresistive stuff is rather great!

  4. Re:Storage.... by Artemis3 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think by then MRAM will be ready to take over all memory needs and possibly mass storage needs.

    MRAM is: Fast like SRAM, less power hungry than DRAM (no refresh!), and keeps its state like flash, but without degrading when written to... Its obvious this will make all other types obsolete.

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    Artix
    Your Linux, your init.