Sunday French physicists claimed that they discovered the means to boost data access of hard drives nearly 100,000 times the normal rate.
Sunday French physicists claimed that they discovered the means to boost data access of hard drives nearly 100,000 times the normal rate. The team, led by Jean-Yves Bigot of the Institute of Materials Physics and Chemistry in Strasbourg, used an ultra-fast, "femtosecond" laser to alter the electronic spin of a hard drive, thus speeding up the retrieval and storage aspects.
The new laser technology is based on "spintronics," or rather, spin transport electronics, a technology that won the 2007 Nobel physics prize. With spintronics, an electrical output is generated by the natural spin of electrons within a magnetic field. At the same time, a read/write head records and retrieves data stored on the disk. The problem with this method is that the magnetic sensors used to detect the data are rather slow; supposedly, the new laser is much faster.
"Our method is called the photonics of spin, because it is photons [particles of light] that modify the state of the electrons' magnetization on the storage surface," Bigot told AFP. He also explained that data is retrieved with a burst that lasts just a millionth of a billionth of a second.
Unfortunately, femtosecond lasers aren't available for general consumer electronics--especially in laptops and desktop computers--measuring 12-inches by four-inches in size. However, the technology may see a reduction in size within the next decade, especially if interested parties such as IBM, Hitachi and other corporations continue to show great interest.
source : *www.tomsguide.com/us/Laser-HDD-Read-Write,news-4028.html
Sunday French physicists claimed that they discovered the means to boost data access of hard drives nearly 100,000 times the normal rate. The team, led by Jean-Yves Bigot of the Institute of Materials Physics and Chemistry in Strasbourg, used an ultra-fast, "femtosecond" laser to alter the electronic spin of a hard drive, thus speeding up the retrieval and storage aspects.
The new laser technology is based on "spintronics," or rather, spin transport electronics, a technology that won the 2007 Nobel physics prize. With spintronics, an electrical output is generated by the natural spin of electrons within a magnetic field. At the same time, a read/write head records and retrieves data stored on the disk. The problem with this method is that the magnetic sensors used to detect the data are rather slow; supposedly, the new laser is much faster.
"Our method is called the photonics of spin, because it is photons [particles of light] that modify the state of the electrons' magnetization on the storage surface," Bigot told AFP. He also explained that data is retrieved with a burst that lasts just a millionth of a billionth of a second.
Unfortunately, femtosecond lasers aren't available for general consumer electronics--especially in laptops and desktop computers--measuring 12-inches by four-inches in size. However, the technology may see a reduction in size within the next decade, especially if interested parties such as IBM, Hitachi and other corporations continue to show great interest.
source : *www.tomsguide.com/us/Laser-HDD-Read-Write,news-4028.html