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New Technique Promises Much Faster Hard Drive Write Speeds
MrSeb writes "Hold onto your hats: Scientists at the University of York, England have completely rewritten the rules of magnetic storage (abstract; full paper paywalled). Instead of switching a magnetic region using a magnetic field (like a hard drive head), the researchers have managed to switch a ferrimagnetic nanoisland using a 60-femtosecond laser. Storing magnetic data using lasers is up to 1,000 times faster than writing to a conventional hard drive (we're talking about gigabytes or terabytes per second) — and the ferrimagnetic nanoislands that store the data are capable of storage densities that are some 15 times greater than existing hard drive platters. Unfortunately the York scientists only detailed writing data with lasers; there's no word on how to read it."
Who needs to read data back anyway?
If they can't read it, how do they know if they actually wrote it? Or maybe reading it is 10,000 times slower than current read technology.
A future-proof storage medium.
frickin hard drives with laser beams!
Just got wider.
I would certainly guess that the technology would allow for reading, if not at top speed, but at least significantly faster read times than the current technology. If it can write, stands to reason that the laser can read... do we not already have reading lasers in use in various technologies?
At one time I had designed a backup storage system that could handle backing up PBs of data in only a few seconds -- and it's capacity was endless, and it was free for anyone to use.
Restore? You want to restore? Let me introduce you to my price list. :-)
writing the cute useless powerpoint presentations that waste so much everyone's time will be done 1000 times faster, so will downloading swimsuit pictures (minus the swimsuit for some :) )
awesome, we're gonna be able to waste time so much faster haha
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
How can scientists know the write was successful without being able to read back as well...surely there is an in implied read in the mix, otherwise the discovery isn't worth the paper it is written on!
Considering how often I back stuff up, but how rarely I ever use those backups, I'll gladly take 1,000 times faster backups even if it means slower read speeds than we have now. Really, I'ld take that trade-off in a heartbeat.
If I remember correctly, several years ago they said a 500 Terabyte Drive would be comming out soon, never happend.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
I think I'll - $32?! Jeezus, if I was still a student I'd be set..
we just need fiber optic internet connections to become standard enough so we can put all that fast reading and writing to use! ;)
Would one of those Blu-Ray reader lenses work? Or does it need to be smaller than that?
No way to read these things? Wow, Who needs encryption now... (Ok.. Ok.. Just write your data to /dev/null...)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
How do they know that they wrote it if they can't read it?
If they can read it at least as fast as today's technologies, the power required to read/write data is roughly the same as today's drives and the manufacturing cost is also about the same, this is good news for everyone:
1. On the consumer side, cheaper drives per terabyte meaning cheaper home media servers
2. On the commercial side, a lot less energy required, i.e. no need for ultra-fast 15k RPM drives in servers, need up to 15 times fewer drives in server farms. This is BIG.
There is only one problem.
If they can't read it.. how do they know they have written data?..
Those two activities are generally not limited by disk access speed.
If it's paywalled, it didn't happen!
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
As an added bonus the factory can continue to operate even if it's flooded [//to do: insert conspiracy theory here] as the lasers can then be attached to sharks.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Write Once Read None.
A classic tecnology updated!
http://www.national.com/rap/files/datasheet.pdf
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Isn't this similar to/an extension of how minidisc worked? So couldn't the reading be done in a similar matter then?
They've just re-invented the Magneto-optical drive!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
You have no idea how much pron that guy downloads. Although viewing it would still be limited by read speeds.
"Unfortunately the York scientists only detailed writing data with lasers; there's no word on how to read it." A bit of a paradox don't you think? How did they know it was written without being able to read it?
Pfffffft. You silly scientists... it's lasers all the way down!
Using polarized reflection - the reading beam is unpolarized, a reflected polarized light would be rotated under the influence of the magnetic recording, thus allowing high speed read read.
Might still require a much higher speed rotation though.
No man is a nano-island!
A harddrive with frikkin LASERS attached to its HEAD!!
Next to WORM we now also have WORN (Write Once Read Never) memory. Progress!
or the platter is spinning 1000 times faster to achieve this throughput?
Don''t have to worry about anyone reading your data.
This solves a major problem with mag recording. Readback head have always been way smaller than write head. You can read back with just a tiny permalloy head but to write you need large currents and loops of wire. So miniaturization has been limited by the write head size not the read head. This solves the write-head size problem but may have created a new read head problem. But that's very promising.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is the data equivalent of freezing Walt Disney and assuming that someday we'll figure out how to thaw and revive him. Write now, read someday.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Newport has an ultrafast 400 fs laser with a claimed high repetition rate (http://www.newport.com/Spirit#tab_Specifications), but the rep rate is only 1 MHz. Who cares if you set a bit in 60 fs but then your laser can only write 1Mb/sec to disk. What's that, the speed of a Zip Disk?
Unfortunately the York scientists only detailed writing data with lasers; there's no word on how to read it.
Well, that's not necessarily a problem. You could easily have a drive where the write is done by a laser while reading still uses the conventional magnetic head.
A lot of applications such as databases are still bound by the speed they write to the drive (where the write cache is fairly small so when doing a large write it slows to a crawl after the initial Mb has been written), while reading is already much faster because the OS can use any spare RAM as a cache which can be several Gb. This increases the write speed to the platter by an order of magnitude which could have a huge impact on those write times.
(As an alumini of the University of York I find this rather exciting news).
This uses ferrimagnetic domains, not ferromagnetic domains. There is no external magnetic field, and you can't use a coil to read them.
only detailed writing data with lasers; there's no word on how to read it.
Sounds like Windows' strategy: Crap the write to wherever on disk, and don't care about performance in reading it back. Why bother when read-time performance, when the user can defrag every day?
Backup "tapes" currently grind along at 10,000 RPM or so, depending on the device. Their primary purpose is to write data; you hope you never have to read from it. The thought of writing backups at 150K RPM - finishing what is currently a three hour backup in about fifteen minutes - that would be spectacular. Sure, the data restore would still take 3+ hours - but again, you cross your fingers and hope you never have to do that restore anyway.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Hey, we have had files that were read-only for a very long time! Now we'll have files that are write-only. Brilliant!
They have re-invented the write-only memory or WOM! Back in grad school some friends and I developed a spec sheet for the wood-insulated gate write-only memory or WIGWOM. Another billion dollar idea that went nowhere.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe someone could explain this, but it appears that this method will always flip the bit from its current position. This would imply you need to know the current state of a bit in order to know if you needed to flip it, so wouldn't you have to read each bit before you could write any data with this method?
WORM - Write Once Read Many
WORN - Write Once Read Never
I've been using write-only media for years - it's the stuff between my ears! FWIW, back in the 1970's, Signetics posted a full page ad in (I think) EDN magazine for a write-only memory chip (complete with schematic) for the April 1 issue... I still have a scanned copy of it in my archives for posterity sake. Absolute a brilliant hoot!
If they can't read it, how can they know that the lasers wrote successfully? Or does that mean they read it using conventional means?
SSDs, anyone?
I could be off-base, but could radar be effective to read info at that scale?
Is dd if=file of=/dev/null they talking about?
possible terabyte-per-second writing to cd! fastest writing ever! You will be amazed at the speed! More storage capacity! and more!
fine-print note: the content copied onto cd may not be able to be read.
The German company Convar reads data from damaged hard drives using blue lasers. They're currently recovering data from the World Trade Centre hard disks using this blue laser method.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Cool, write only media.
> there's no word on how to read it
With the remaining eye.
I told my wife we might need it someday!
Gently reply
"Unfortunately the York scientists only detailed writing data with lasers; there's no word on how to read it."
Use lasers. Duh. :)
-Charlie
OK, my visual cortex is officially due for repair. I read the headline as "New Technique Promises Much Faster Hot Damn Write Speeds"
Towards the Singularity.