Laser Heat Used to Make HDD Write Transfers Faster
Researchers have discovered that recording data on a HDD platter using a quick laser burst is much faster than the traditional use of a magnetic field.
Researchers at the University of York's Department of Physics have discovered a way to record data on an old-school mechanical hard drive without using a magnetic field. Instead, they used laser heating which processes information much faster on a magnetic medium (platter in this case) than current means used in today's drives. This discovery should not only make future magnetic recording devices perform much faster, but also more energy efficient.
"This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes (thousands of Gigabytes) of information per second, hundreds of times faster than present hard drive technology," said York physicist Thomas Ostler in a paper published in the February edition of the Nature Communications journal. "As there is no need for a magnetic field, there is also less energy consumption."
In the paper, Ostler describes a system that uses a sub-picosecond laser pulse to quickly heat the magnetic medium to around 800 degrees Celsius for a brief moment. This heating significantly speeds up the process of reversing the magnetic polarity of a particular bit. Current hard drives use an external magnetic field applied to a spinning magnetic medium to invert the polarity of the two magnetic poles.

An experimental image supplied to Science Daily shows two nano islands that have different magnetic orientations. After the islands are hit with a single laser pulse, the magnetic direction of both islands changes. By the fourth pulse, they've returned to their initial state.
"For centuries it has been believed that heat can only destroy the magnetic order," said Dr. Alexey Kimel, from the Institute of Molecules and Materials, Radboud University Nijmegen. "Now we have successfully demonstrated that it can, in fact, be a sufficient stimulus for recording information on a magnetic medium."
The team of scientists behind the discovery include researchers from Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine, Russia, Japan and the Netherlands. The experimental work was conducted at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland, the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands.
ah - didn't read it properly - seems a bit like minidisc but without the magnetic head.
If a write a full disk in one go then I can make a BBQ as well, great news!!! xD
I wonder what would happen if a make a copy of a full RAID, ROFL
I wonder is hard drives have been traditionally rated by rotational speed (5400/5900/7200/10000) RPM's
then, how would they be rated now when/if this technology makes it to the consumer?
Will this laser allow for multiple recordings on hard drives?
What about Disk Defragmenting?
Like some asked: What about read speeds?
Would it boot faster than a hard drive?
Would speed be comparable or better than SSD's?
More importantly:
When this drives make it to the consumer, Will I be able to keep all my body parts?
and... Will my wallet suffer?
Not that faster write speeds are not appreciated !!
There is no read yet, this technology is still in diapers, basically they were just experimenting with lasers and "reading" the results with ST microscope. It's more just a demonstration, it is way too early to talk about practical application. There are many more problems to be solved.
Also, I find it hard to believe that it would take less power to heat a platter than to aim a small radio at it. Besides, would this not wear out the media having so many localized temperature variations? I mean, it is cool tech, but hard to believe it would work 'as advertised'.
Not going to lie, first thing came to mind as well.
This is laser only for writing, while MD used a laser for heat and magnetic to write then read with the laser alone.
Still make me think of MD for sure.
Only the fastest mechanical drives in the world are that fast, and only when the data is both sequential and at the edge of the platter for maximum rotational velocity on the platter. This is obviously a fairly rare occurrence.
Generating magnetic fields actually requires considerably more power than a picosecond pulse of a laser.
The amount of energy being delivered is very small. Metal is remarkably elastic, and not all metals are subject to fatigue (getting weaker after repeated small stresses). This will probably be one of the easier problems for them to solve.