New storage technology could speed up hard drives over a hundredfold

Washington, Feb 8 (ANI): Researchers have now come up with an avant-garde technology, which could make future hard drives super quick and record thousands of gigabytes per second.

According to University of York researchers, the new storage method would use heat to write information to the magnetic storage systems, instead of magnetic fields and the drives using the technology will be hundreds of times faster than previous drives.

"Instead of using a magnetic field to record information on a magnetic medium, we harnessed much stronger internal forces and recorded information using only heat," the Daily Mail quoted York physicist Thomas Ostler as saying.

The technology uses ultra-short heat pulses to change the magnetism of material in the drive, thus paving the way for far faster drives.

"This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes - thousands of gigabytes - of information per second, hundreds of times faster than present hard drive technology.

"As there is no need for a magnetic field, there is also less energy consumption."

Modern magnetic recording technology employs the principle that the North Pole of a magnet is attracted to the South Pole of another and two like poles repulse.

So far, it has been considered that in order to record one bit of information - by inverting the poles of a magnet - there was a need to apply an external magnetic field.

The stronger the applied field, the faster the recording of a magnetic bit of information.

However, the team of scientists has showed that the positions of both the North and South Poles of a magnet can be inverted by an ultrashort heat pulse, harnessing the power of much stronger internal forces of magnetism. (ANI)