The future of hard drives?

[steelcity_ballin]

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-phy ... rough.html

This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes (thousands of Gigabytes) of information per second, hundreds of times faster than present hard drive technology.

If it ever becomes publicly available, any guesses as to the cost of one of these?

[DPete27]

I think of mechanical hard drives as "magnetic storage." I see no reason why this technology would benefit that.
SSD's currently use NAND flash which uses electrical transistors not magnetic storage. SSD-type devices (or RAM) are the only things that could benefit from something like this where it would somehow have to replace the flash chips currently being used in SSD's and RAM. Mechanical hard drives that currently use magnetic storage are limited by the speed of their moving parts, not the speed of polarity switching once the head passes over the write area. In order to benefit from this technology you would have to eliminate all moving parts (similar to SSD's)
Ultimately, it looks very underdeveloped, all that article says is that researchers were able to change the magnetic polarity of a few particles with heat. That's nowhere near being ready for the consumer market. Furthermore, where's the comparison to the polarity switching speed of currently used storage (aka using externally applied magnetic fields)? The only thing they really claim is energy savings (also not backed by any actual comparisons).

[just brew it!]

Being able to flip a single magnetic domain in 60 femtoseconds is a long way from producing a practical storage device. How fast would the platters need to spin to record terabytes per second? Even 100,000 RPM probably wouldn't be fast enough. Furthermore, this new process only works for writing; you'll still need magnetic heads to read the data back, so your read speeds would likely be similar to drives using traditional tech.

In the grand scheme of things, the power savings will be small. The write heads consume only a small fraction of the power used by a hard drive (most of it goes to the spindle motor and head actuator).

In practice, this development may (if the tech matures enough to be commercially viable) allow the steady upward march of HDD densities and speeds to continue. I don't think it is going to lead to any revolutionary breakthroughs.

[DPete27]

Looks like this article made it to the TR main page.
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/22442

[imanuelaa]

I think Uranium could be the future of hard drives.