Heat-based laser recording augments hard drive speed
Baku, February 9 (AZERTAC). A team of researchers has discovered a new method of recording information to hard drives that could dramatically increase their speed. In fact, the new method could increase a hard drive`s speed by hundreds of times. The report, which was filed in Nature Communications Tuesday, found that heat-based hard drive recording increases the speed of hard drives to levels that have previously been unimaginable.
Prior to the heat-based method of recording, engineers used an external magnetic field to invert the poles of a magnet in order to record information to a hard drive. In fact, a hard drive is a collection of magnetic disks that are capable of recording and storing information. The data on a hard drive is stored magnetically, which means that the information is not lost when a computer is shut down.
“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,” said Thomas Ostler, a physicist at University of York, according to TG Daily.
In language that is technically complex, the researchers write that they have discovered a “novel mechanism of deterministic magnetization reversal in a ferrimagnet driven by an ultrafast heating of the medium resulting from the absorption of a sub-picosecond laser pulse with the presence of a magnetic field.”
The excerpt from the report`s abstract is translated to mean that the researchers found that they could greatly speed up the process of reversing the magnetic polarity of a bit by heating a magnetic hard drive to approximately 800 degrees Celsius for a short period of time.
“This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes 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,” Mr. Ostler added.
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