Laser Hard Drives Will be 100 Times Faster
When boffins at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands, decided they needed a faster hard drive, they turned to coolest of all future-tech: Lasers. The magnetic heads used in hard discs have a finite top speed, but laser pulses fired at the magnetic platter can write data at intervals of 40 femtoseconds (that's 10⁻¹⁵ seconds), a 100-fold speed increase.
According to Science Now, the photons carry angular momentum, which is how the light manages to actually write the data to the magnetic surface. The heat provided by the laser doesn't hurt, either, making the state change of the metal a little easier. This won't work with existing drive materials, though. The team behind the Laser disc (sorry) use an exotic mix of gadolinium, iron, and cobalt to work the magic.
We won't be seeing this in consumer devices for another ten years, and by that time we'll probably be measuring our disk sizes in
