Last week IBM Corp researchers reported in Science magazine that they have found a way of recording data on disk up to one thousand times faster than current techniques. By applying magnetic field impulses perpendicular to the direction of magnetization rather than anti-parallel to it, the magnetic poles of spinning particals can be flipped over or reversed in picoseconds rather than the nanoseconds it currently takes. The researchers applied the pulses to thin films of cobalt and say their operating requirement is well within reach of conventional thin-fim recording heads. As well as improving read/write time the technique is also supposed to improve the quality of reproduced images or sounds. The promise of the technique is the creation of super-fast disk storage devices.
