'Racetrack' Memory Could Replace Hard Drives?

Galactic_grub writes "An experimental new type of memory that uses nanosecond pulses of electric current to push magnetic regions along a wire could dramatically boost the capacity, speed and reliability of storage devices. Magnetic domains are moved along a wire by pulses of polarized current, and their location is read by fixed sensors arranged along the wire. Previous experiments have been disappointing, but now researchers have found that super-fast pulses of electricity prevent the domains from being obstructed by imperfections in the crystal."

Anything

[eldavojohn]

Anything would be better than the current way my hard drive works. Spinning discs on a platter?! A thousand moving parts?! What is this, the Stone Age?!

Who needs nylon?

[Andy_R]

I just ping foreign servers a lot

Re:I've seen it in fibre before...

[Anonymous Coward]

if I had a dollar for every time they've said "this new XYZ technology could replace hard drives," I could buy a lot of hard drives

Goddamn kids

[PixelScuba]

Bah, in my day, the REAL Stone Age, we had to etch hash marks into a nearby rock to save our data. You damn kids and your fancy, rewritable magnetic storage media.

Re:Anything

[comradeeroid]

Anything would be better than the current way my hard drive works. Spinning discs on a platter?! A thousand moving parts?! What is this, the Stone Age?!

Well, actually it's worse than the stone age. Back then we had "Monoliths" which (apart from glacial shift and other geological "features" - or "bugs" as anyone outside sales management called them) had no moving (of movable even) parts at all.

When the storage space on a monolith wasn't enough you could expand to a "Circle".
Still, the space on a full circle even with a connected "Altar" and a full set of "Druids" and "Maidens" peripheals wasn't more than perhaps 256 bytes. So the monolith system was later on replaced by paper which had the benefit of portability but the drawback of reduced lifespan.

Paper was a very popular form of storage, though with some flaws. For example attempts at "burning" information onto papers were done several times in recorded history (for instance back in 1939) but even if it was a fast and effective way to handle the information it was totally destructive to the media and had to be abandoned. Burning then lay dormant as a form of inprinting information on media until the discovery of CD's.

CD's are a hybrid technology combining one not very moving part with several moving parts that moves the unmoving part around. No clever explanation for this behaviour has ever been found and most scientists just doesn't like to talk about it.

Re:Anything

[BrewedInTexas]

That was a quick trip to Godwin's.

Re:Plus one addressing

[Rorschach1]

Mel [pbm.com]? Is that you?

Ah, memories...

[PHAEDRU5]

When I was working on the development of DEC's DHU-11 at their Acre Rd., Reading, UK plant, we had this real comedian on staff.

One day, when the first protoype of the DHU-11 (we're talking wire-wrap here) was to be demoed, he rigged up a little plastic pipe that ran from the backplane of the PDP 11/24 holding the prototype to a place just out of sight of the various higher-up mucky-mucks who were receiving the demo.

Right after the machine was fired up, he took a big drag on his cigarette and blew into the pipe. Smoke out of backplance, widespread panic in lab. I mean, we all know that ICs become useless after the magic smoke is released, and we were using some of the first 8751s Intel ever made.

After we staked him out over an ant hill, we went off for pints at the Swan at Streatley.

Re:Sounds like...

[grangerfx]

I remember taking apart an old CRT terminal decades ago to see how it worked. It contained a sealed flat metal case. When I opened it, I was shocked to discover a simple coil of wire with a precision set screw on the end. The function of the device was obvious. The contents of the display buffer were shunted into the coil where the bits were cycled endlessly. When a new character needed to be added the oldest was dropped off the end.

Old news

[bughouse26]

What's scary is the story appeared in the Economist a week and a half before it appeared on slashdot.