Speeding Up Storage – Researchers Heat Up Data with Laser Hard Drives

With research published in Nature Communications two days ago,  heat can now be seen as friend and not foe in terms of data storage.

As reported Caleb Garling on Wired last night.  

“A team of researchers from across Europe and Asia has demonstrated a way of using laser heat rather than magnetic fields to store data, potentially increasing the speed of your hard drive by 100 times or more.

Tom Ostler — a physicist at the University of York, which led the research project — tells Wired that this would allow your machine to save files much faster, but also reduce the machine’s power consumption by avoiding traditional magnetic storage techniques. […]

Typically, data is written to hard drives using magnetic fields. By shifting fields, you can write 1′s and 0′s, changing the polarization of the material where the data is stored. One polarization represents a 1; another represents a 0.

Heat has long been the enemy of this technique, because it distorts the fields. But with their paper, Ostler and crew have shown a way using heat that changes a material’s polarization without using magnetic fields, storing thousands of gigabytes of data in a single second. Basically, their laser blasts a 60-femtosecond pulse — that’s 60 quadrillionths of a second — onto a material made primarily of iron and gadolinium.” 

Read the full article here.

Ramping up data storage speeds could ultimately lead to a swifter migration of the millions of hours needed to secure our world's current, and continously created, store of AV digital data.  

Of course, as the Ostler also admits to Wired, the gap in the paper is that it doesn’t account for reading data “there’s still no faster way of reading data without magnetic fields”

For another peek at the research check out “Heat-based recording ups hard drive speeds”  on  broadcastnow.co.uk.
 

Share: