Hard Drives

with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!

This via ComputerWorld:

Lasers could make disk drives a hundred times faster
There are problems to be resolved
Chris Mellor

July 05, 2007 (TechWorld.com) -- Researchers have demonstrated disk write speeds one hundred times faster than current hard drives. The method uses a laser to heat the recording surface and alter its magnetic field. There is no equivalent read speed increase though.

According to a report in Science Now, Dutch scientists at Radboud University Nijmegen used a laser to send flashes of polarized light to a 5-micron-wide spot on a disk surface which was heated. The sheer angular momentum of the photons hitting the recording surface was then able to flip the magnetic field if the light was polarized one way, but left it unaltered if polarized in the other direction. A traditional magnetic field reader was then able to detect binary ones or zeroes accordingly.

This shows the promise of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) (see "Bootless PCs and terabytes on a dime").

The laser flash duration was 40 femtoseconds -- 40 billionths of a millionth of a second -- which is 100 times shorter than the time needed for a current write head to change the magnetic field direction on a hard drive disk recording bit. Thus there is the promise of increasing data writing speed up to one hundred times. This will enable hard disk data writing speed to better keep up with ever-faster data transfers across networks.

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Celebrate, my friends, for being witness to a revolution which shall surely usher in a Second Third Fourth Fifth New Golden Age of ultrafast porn storage and retrieval.