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New Technique Promises Much Faster Hard Drive Write Speeds

Posted by Unknown on from the sharks-in-my-drives dept.

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."

6 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Who cares about reading? by rjejr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Who cares about reading? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You can only write as fast as data can be read so your backups will not be 1,000 times faster.

  2. Good news everyone! by Yvan256 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:So how do they know if they actually wrote it by Stonent1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I would think that you would still have to read the location of the cluster before writing to it. Sure you can flip magnetic particles N > S or S > N at bazillions per second speed but if you don't know what you're flipping that's not good.

  4. Re:So how do they know if they actually wrote it by the_B0fh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why? If they can write TB/s and store data at 15X of current capacity, and SSDs can't, why move to SSDs?

    The read problem is easily resolved by having multiple read heads that can read independently.

  5. Re:Cryogenic data storage by ProbablyJoe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And the answer will almost certainly be yes.