Laser Hard Drive high transfer speeds

As hard drives grow in capacity, our ability to transfer data from the device is still limited by the power of the magnet to transfer those zeroes and ones. However the boffins at Radboud University Nijmegen in Holland have used polarised laser light to read and write data from a magnetic drive. In the past the issue has been the inability of the laser to actually write to the surface of the drive, however reasearchers at the university have developed a gadolinium, iron, and cobalt alloy surface for their drives which the laser beam just loves to read and write on.

Using polarised laser light the researchers were able to transfer data at about 100 times the speed of conventional magnetic drives - at intervals of 40 femtaseconds - we’re not sure what a femtasecond is but it sounds pretty cool!

The downside? Well there’s two things really, the footprint of the technology is 5 microns which is considerably larger than current magnetic data transfer tech - this is the next nut to crack for the team at Radboud - and the first prototype is about ten years away. However this is still a giant step forward in data transfer technology so I say ‘Proost’ to the researchers at Radboud!

Source: Science Magazine

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Posted in Hardware by JB