Racetrack memory: data storage revolution
p2pnet news | Products:- It’s faster, more compact and more rugged than hard disks, promises IBM of racetrack memory, its new class of data storage.
“It works by storing data in a permalloy nanowire, a thousand times thinner than a human hair,” says IWRBlog, quoting Science.
“It promises to increase reliability and speed of storage while slashing the amount of energy needed to power it.”
Storage density can be hundreds of times that of today’s best flash memories and, “because the wires can be made to loop from the surface of the chip, they overcome the well-known chip density restrictions of Moore’s Law,” says the story.
Under Moore’s Law, the number of transistors whihc can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years, says the Wikipedia, adding:
“The observation was first made by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper. The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop for another decade at least and perhaps much longer.”
Racetrack memory, “would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs – or 3,500 films – and cost far less to produce,” says Times Online.
A team at IBM’s research centre in San Jose, California, said devices which use the new technology would need much less power, would run on a single battery charge for “weeks at a time”, and would last for decades.
The story has Stuart Parkin (right), the IBM fellow who led the research, saying the promise of racetrack memory – for example, the ability to carry massive amounts of information in your pocket, “could unleash creativity leading to devices and applications that nobody has imagined yet”.
Nor is this his first key discovery.
“An I.B.M. research fellow largely unknown outside a small fraternity of physicists, Mr. Parkin puttered for two years in a lab in the early 1990s, trying to find a way to commercialize an odd magnetic effect of quantum mechanics he had observed at supercold temperatures,” says the New York Times, adding:
“With the help of a research assistant, he was able to manipulate the alignment of electronics to alter the magnetic state of tiny areas of a magnetic data storage disc, making it possible to store and retrieve information in a smaller amount of space. The huge increases in digital storage made possible by giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, made consumer audio and video iPods, as well as Google-style data centers, a reality.”
IWRBlog – Racetrack memory to save us from ourselves?, April 11, 2008
Times Online – The new chip that will let an iPod store 500,000 songs, April 11, 2008
New York Times – Redefining the Architecture of Memory, April 11, 2008
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April 11th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Certainly convenient for offline filesharing, away from the eyes of the MAFIAA.
April 11th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Yes, let’s start a black market
April 11th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Hmmm… an mp3 filled to the brim with half a million songs…
Better yet, think of a 3.5″ drive made of this stuff.
Probably more songs than there are in the world.
April 11th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Think of all the pr0n I can get on it.
April 12th, 2008 at 11:35 am
ThE RIAA is really really screwed.
April 18th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Won’t such a database/data storage solution require an equally fast and effective data transfer system. Most enterprises use the ethernet/internet and that too on the LAN. I think holding so much data will be useful to the optimum only if it transfered fast as well.