New Technique Promises Much Faster Hard Drive Write Speeds 148
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 cares about reading? (Score:5, Insightful)
Good news everyone! (Score:4, 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 [xkcd.com].
Re:So how do they know if they actually wrote it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So how do they know if they actually wrote it (Score:4, 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.
Re:Who cares about reading? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can only write as fast as data can be read so your backups will not be 1,000 times faster.
Re:Cryogenic data storage (Score:5, Insightful)