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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.
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..
Lasers are currently used in reading optical media like CDs and DVDs... this is magnetic media
we just need fiber optic internet connections to become standard enough so we can put all that fast reading and writing to use! ;)
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
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.
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
But how would you write the data with lasers? Current optical drives use a mechanical tracking system. Perhaps some form of piezoelectric oscillating mirror would be preferred?
Life is not for the lazy.
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."
Blu-Ray is an optical medium. Hard drives are magnetic. The use of lasers in writing is unusual. They use the lasers to flip magnetic bits. The lasers can't simply be shined onto a bit and then have light deflected in one of two directions depending on the data stored.
Write Once Read None.
A classic tecnology updated!
http://www.national.com/rap/files/datasheet.pdf
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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!
No man is a nano-island!
or the platter is spinning 1000 times faster to achieve this throughput?
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?
In the case of magnetic media, lasers write by literally burning sections of the disc and read by reading the reflections from burnt/unburnt sections to get bits (commercially pressed discs have bumps instead of burned sections, but are read in much the same manner). From what I recall, CD burners are separate lasers for burning and reading. Optical media just happens to use lasers for both reading and writing, but they're two different lasers (assuming I remember correctly).
I'm guessing here, but I'm assuming for magnetic media, the energy from the laser targets the magnetic bit and causes it to flip in a similar manner to how CDs are burnt, but because its magnetic, lasers can't also be used to read it so you'd need a traditional magnetic head.
Indeed, if the disk could be also read the same way like MO disks, it would be promising: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optic_Kerr_effect
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.
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
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?
The difficulty is getting one sensitive enough to handle bits a tiny fraction the size current hard drives use, and sufficiently high speed to do it on a platter spinning at several thousand RPM.
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?
Been done before. Chmod 222.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"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.