Toward terabit-rate high-density recording

Research is well in hand on the next generation of ultra high-density magneto-optical storage devices which could store more than 6,000 Terabits (6 petabits) of data – or more than 70 times the contents of the entire US Library of Congress – on a single 5-inch disc.
But capacity is not enough. A high read/write speed is crucial.
Now researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University have demonstrated a way to record on ferromagnetic films using a laser-assisted, ultrafast magnetization reversal dynamics.
Tianshu Lai and colleagues showed that the magnetization reversal could occur in a sub-nanosecond time scale, which suggests that ultrafast data writing – at least 30 times faster than that of present hard disks in computers – is possible
Newswise.com reports that the article on Lai and colleagues’ research appears in the Journal of Applied Physics.