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Laser-based technology promises faster hard drives

Researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands believe they've taken the first step towards solving some of the speed problems of a traditional magnet-based hard drive system.

It goes without saying that modern computing really took off ever since storage became plentiful and cheaper. Ironically, storage devices are also held responsible for hobbling computing, as hard drive access times haven't kept pace with processor clockspeed increases. Though flash drives or solid state drives are around, they still don’t combine speed and limitless storage capacity.

Now, researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands claim to have taken the first step towards solving some of the speed problems of a traditional magnet-based hard drive system. They were able to transfer data to a magnetic hard drive using laser light at speeds of up to 40 femtoseconds per bit. A femto is a quadrillionth of a second and is 100x faster than the current methods.

However, there are many issues to be resolved before laser transfers become a reality. As of now, the housing for a laser capable of emitting a pulse just 40fs long is approximately three-foot square and draws up to a kilowatt of power. As for the read head, the laser pulse’s ‘footprint’ on the disk is approximately five microns, far larger than the footprint of current magnetic read/write heads. Researchers are hoping to take advantage of recent advances in microscopy which can focus a laser beam to a spot as small as 10 nm. If the issues are ironed out and a low-cost laser found, it would be a significant breakthrough in the hard drive industry.

[ via arstechnica ]