

Magnetic recording breakthrough reported - arjn
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120207133506.htm

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arjn
Update: I tried to find some more info but unfortunately it looks like the
original paper is behind a pay-wall. Here are some related links :
<http://www.psi.ch/media/using-heat-for-storing-data>

[http://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-
events/news/2012/research/mag...](http://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-
events/news/2012/research/magnetic-recording/)

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gfodor
Since this doesn't affect read speed, it's interesting to imagine what would
happen if there were a de-facto asymmetry between read and write speed for
hard disks. I'd guess you might end up in a world where a "disk" actually
becomes a "RAID-array-in-a-box" so parallel reads could make the read speed be
close to the write speed.

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Lagged2Death
If the heat pulses only _toggle_ the state of the nano-islands, then it makes
little practical sense to speak of 'write speed,' since you'll have to
determine the current state of the bits (that is, you'll have to read them)
before you attempt to write them.

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ajays
Terabytes per second? Really?? Given that SATA-3 is still at 6Gbps, this would
be 1300x faster than SATA-3. How would you get data to a drive that fast for
it to write?

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InclinedPlane
Sort of a moot point regardless. If you have a spinning disk the average
latency and maximum read or write speed is determined by the speed of the
disk.

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ars
Not necessarily. For example you could have many read heads and read from the
disk much faster by reading in parallel. It's complicated to do, but it is
possible.

You can also increase the areal density, which means more bits fly past the
head per second, which also increases speed, even though you can't increase
the rotational or seek speed.

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yread
I would expect that's how they plan on getting to those ridiculous write
speeds. Decrease the size of 1 bit so that more of them would fit on one track
(a circle on a platter). They would be able to do that since the time to flip
the region of the bit would be smaller. However, there is still the problem of
finding a material with that much smaller magnetic regions. Which is already a
problem in current drives (perpendicular recording) so I don't expect this to
fly.

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jcfrei
I tend to believe that in the short/mid future consumer hardware will mostly
consist of SSD or similiar solid state forms of memory. Abandoning spinning
disks and relying on much faster, smaller and more reliable memory seems so
much more promising than hard disks.

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eru
Yes. But remember, tape was displaced from the mainstream, but lives on in
professional backups. There will still be lots of profitable applications for
spinning disk.

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tocomment
I'm confused. Doesn't a writable DVD work on the same principle of using a
laser to heat small portions of a spinning disc? Why should this methods be so
many orders of magnitude faster than writing to a DVD?

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delinka
First, keep in mind that this is a modification to hard drives and not DVD-
like equipment. The heat pulses in the case of the article are still modifying
the magnetic bits on a spinning metal disk.

Second, it seems that it's faster to generate these heat pulses than it is to
switch the magnetic orientation of the write head. I haven't looked into the
physics, but this is the only plausible explanation my limited imagination can
fathom.

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afhof
Does this affect read speed at all? The article only mentions write speed.

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johapers
The readout will still be carried out by a magnetoresistive sensor, so that is
not directly affected. With a smaller bit size it might be necessary to
further develop the read head, but the road map for that is quite well
understood at the moment.

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lmm
Didn't minidiscs read the data optically? Could that tech be combined with
this to make a pure-laser hard disk?

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jergason
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?

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replax
In response to your question on availability in commercial HDs, I think that
unless a comparable significant advance is made in read speeds, I doubt that
you will find it in consumer grade HDDs soon. A disk that can read at e.g.
100mb/s and write at 50gb/s would be not easy to sell to the consumer at a
premium price (where do I get data faster than my HD/SSD read speeds from to
store?).

I assume though, that it might be used in e.g. CERN, where they need to store
a ridiculous amount of data in very short time. Or similar activities where
the write speeds are the limiting factor.

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ars
I could definitely use great write speed and average read speed.

Use RAID-1 (mirroring) and have lots of disks in parallel. You can combine
them for great read speed, but you still have to write to every one of them so
writing is not improved.

If your write speed was much faster than read then this would work perfectly.

It would also find applications in things like data archiving, warehousing. Or
buffering huge amounts of data for later processing (like the large hadron
collider).

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leeoniya
my question being, wouldn't these drives be much more susceptible to rapid and
massive data loss from changes in ambient or operating temperature?

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arjn
not any more than regular HDDs. The method described will probably be applied
to existing HDD platter technology (my opinon)

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rsanchez1
How would the performance compare to a SSD?

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replax
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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redthrowaway
On top of the read problem, they have to deal with the fact that HDDs are just
really energy-inefficient. With the world going to mobile, we can't predicate
the future on the need for moving parts.

It's a damned cool technology, and I hope it leads to something useful, but I
just can't see it becoming the prevalent paradigm.

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replax
Yes, you're right the world is going mobile and in mobile less (no) moving
parts is better (more durable etc.) That is also why I think that consumer
grade devices will be unlikely (unless read speeds are bumped up, too)

But mobile, in our case, means also a shift to the cloud, where significant
more potent storage technologies could make a real difference. I really hope,
too, that technology will lead to something new.

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redthrowaway
Fair enough. It's hard to see where these kinds of write (but normal read)
speeds would be necessary, even in a server farm, but I guess the beauty of
enabling technologies is that they allow for use cases no one could have
imagined when they were conceived.

