New Heat Technology for HDDs (not HAMR)

A new magnetic recording technology that will allow information to be processed hundreds of times faster than by current hard drive technology has been developed by an international team of scientists led by the University of York’s Department of Physicshttp://www.york.ac.uk/physics.

The method uses an ultrashort heat pulse to switch magnetic polarity, eliminating the need to apply an external magnetic field.

The ultimate magnetic storage medium, consisting of many individual nanometer-sized magnetic grains with a density of 10 petabytes per square meter. The data is written to the device using an ultrafast heating process to drive the reversal at a data rate of 200Gb/s. Compared to today’s hard drive technology this would allow 10 times the amount of storage capacity and 300 times the performance. (Credit: Richard Evans, University of York)

York physicist Thomas Ostler said: "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. 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."

Dr Alexey Kimel, from the Institute of Molecules and Materials, Radboud University Nijmegen, said: "For centuries it has been believed that heat can only destroy the magnetic order. Now we have successfully demonstrated that it can, in fact, be a sufficient stimulus for recording information on a magnetic medium."

Ref.: T.A. Ostler, et al., Ultrafast heating as a sufficient stimulus for magnetization reversal in a ferrimagnet, Nature Communications, 2012