February 08, 2012, 12:20 PM —
Using a laser to heat magnetic bits on a hard drive may boost write speed hundreds of times.
Today, bits on a hard drive platter are controlled using magnetic force to orient the bit the right way, either a zero or a one. But magnetic heads take more energy and time to change the bits than a heat method newly discovered by University of York researchers. Ultra short heat pulses can now orient the magnetic bits.
Potentially, the speed increases possible could allow the writing of terabytes, or thousands of gigabytes, per second. Reading must still be done with magnetic read heads. And these speeds are under special conditions in a laboratory, with no date for general use indicated.
Great news
Since bursts of infra red light can be used for heat pulses, recording can be sped up considerably.
arjn on news.ycombinator.com
25 years age (1987) a big 3.5" hard disk was 40MB. Now a big 3.5" hard disk 2TB. No, not a 1,000 times increase. More like 50,000!
Paul Durrant on theregister.co.uk
I assume though, that it might be used in e.g. CERN, where they need to store a ridiculous amount of data in very short time. Or similar activities where the write speeds are the limiting factor.
replax on news.ycombinator.com
Other ideas
No news of anyone having anything to record which is hundreds of times more important / interesting than the drivel which infests all too many website today.
Brian on dailymail.co.uk
The disk drive will never die. That is all.
Rocketman on theregister.co.uk
It's a damned cool technology, and I hope it leads to something useful, but I just can't see it becoming the prevalent paradigm.
redthrowaway on news.ycombinator.com
Too little, too late
You can't beat the speed of an electron, mechanical spinning parts is PAST technology I am afraid.
Techno on dailymail.co.uk
I tend to believe that in the short/mid future consumer hardware will mostly consist of SSD or similiar solid state forms of memory.
jcfrei on news.ycombinator.com
Memristor looks like the way forward - solid state *and* no problems with write cycles.
Graham Bartlett on theregister.co.uk
Writing terabytes per second is amazing. Go, Brits, Go.
