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Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

sciencedaily.com

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Re: Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

#4

Post by arjn »

jergason wrote: post #3

Can someone smarter at physics than I am explain how this works? The article specifically suggests use in hard drives, but how soon could this realistically be used in commercial hard drives?

I'm not a physicist, this is what i understand : They've found that very quick heating of a magnetic dipole can cause it to flip. Currently this is flipping is done by a magnetic head (in hard disk drives). Since bursts of infra red light can be used for heat pulses, recording can be sped up considerably.

Re: Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

#8

Post by sliverstorm »

rsanchez1 wrote: post #5

How would the performance compare to a SSD?

Shooting from the hip here; I expect seek disparity would remain about the same, while maximum bandwidth would skyrocket.

Actually, hold on, I wonder if seek would improve very noticeably? Is seek time mostly the long-distance movements of the head, or the locating of the file in-track after the head has traveled? If it is the latter, you might be able to boost seek quite a lot.

Re: Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

#9

Post by replax »

rsanchez1 wrote: post #5

How would the performance compare to a SSD?

Well the article mentions that:

"This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes (thousands of Gigabytes) of information per second"

Therefore, If you can write 1TB/sec the seek it would pretty much outperform any SSD cluster, in terms of writespeed. unfortunately, nothing is said about read speeds/access times and I assume that that will be a harder problem. Because they are still storing the data magnetically and the platters don't emit heat based on their polarisation, they still have to pretty much read like normal hdds do. You cannot (until now, like it was not possible to alter the magnetic polarisation of metals other than with another magnetic field) sense the polarisation except for with another magnetic field.

I am really interested in how that will turn out, but before they make a significant advance in read speeds I doubt that the technology will make it into consumer grade HDD's any time soon.

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