The reason people are so pumped about solid-state hard drives right now is because they’re super-speedy. But if you think your SSD is fast, just wait until a new breed of laser-based hard drives comes to market.
A team of scientists has demonstrated an amazing new way of writing data to magnetic storage devices. It uses lasers, and it can write data to disk about 1000 times quicker than a normal spindle hard drive. We’re talking gigabytes — maybe even terabytes — a second here. How the hell?
What the researchers have actually found is that heating can be used to write information, and it turns out lasers can be used to do the heating extremely efficiently. The findings appear in Nature Communications. Dr Alexey Kimel, one of the researchers, told PhysOrg:
“For centuries it has been believed that heat can only destroy the magnetic order. Now we have successfully demonstrated that it can, in fact, be a sufficient stimulus for recording information on a magnetic medium.”
Using 60 femtosecond pulses of laser — that’s a duration of 60 quadrillionths of a second — it’s possible to rapidly heat a tiny section of the ferrimganetic material that you find in hard drive platters. That heating can change the state of magnetisation, meaning that data can be encoded. All in, each write takes less than 5 picoseconds — 5 trilltionths of a second. That’s how the technique can reach scorching data writing rates of gigabytes per second.
There has to be a catch though, right? There’s always a catch.
Sadly, yes, there is. While the concept for writing data is solid, the team hasn’t yet worked out how it can then read back the data quickly. Seeing as it would be a shame to have your read times a factor of a thousand different to your write times, that aspect is still going to need some work. [Nature Communications and PhsyOrg]
Image: The Webhamster
Prometheus
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 8:35 AMWell this is promising. Hope they work out their reading conundrum. If they work it out, it needs to be cheaper than SSD since it’s still mechanical.
Graphene terahert processors, Laser hard drive disks, mobile market driving compact chips/wireless & bionics/nanites?
The future of technology looks as bright as ever!
wsDK_II
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 8:54 AM^ I see what you did there
Lillee
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 9:00 AMHow is this different from an ordinary CDROM or DVD?
DLB_84
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 9:32 AMCD-ROM and DVD use the reflective properties of a material, rather than the magnetic properties that Hard-Disk Drives use. When you burn a disc, you’re destroying part of the reflective material, such that you get no reflection when you read it back. Reading a disc is a bit like light signalling between ships, except you’re supply the light source.
Timmahh
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 9:01 AMYep… Sounds good, and as Prometheus said it will need to be cheap to compete with SSD. However, I think the Mobo will need a bit of a rehash too, that’s an awful lot of information to try and cram through SATA III :)
Dan
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 9:32 AMhmmm, adding more heat to a computer…
not sure that’s a good move. also will computers/servers operating in very warm environments (we all know this is bad to do, but i can’t count how many people i still see do this) have problems with this? i’m impressed with the innovation, but i would think as computers and mobile devices get smaller, we would be moving further away from components that generate heat instead of developing them around heat.
Jaezass
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 9:49 AMMore heat? Were talking about micro amounts of heat to the platter, they’re not using laser weapons here! :)
Blake
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 10:24 AMI don’t see how 1000X faster than the current fasted HDDs (such as the WD Velociraptor) could be up to the TB range when the Velociraptor still can’t even sustain a write speed of 150MB/s.
SSDs on the other hand are already over 500MB/s and going up.
It would also still need to deal with spinning the actual platters unless you had heaps and heaps of write heads on every layer of the HDD.
They might be able to write one bit really really fast, but getting the platters to move under the write head quick enough (as well as figuring out how to read quickly from it) would take huge amounts of power, the spinning will make lots of noise, and the whole thing will simply not make sense for a consumer.
TL;DR; The problems with spinning platter hard drives is the spinning platter, not the read head.
Carl
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 12:36 PMferromagnetic*