German researchers say they've come up with a new way to boost the capacity and speed of hard drives. An engineering team at the University of Hamburg applied nanosecond bursts of electric current to push magnetically-stored bits of data along a wire at speeds of 110 meters per second, a hundred times faster than current methods.
The idea would be replace the spinning motors that make current hard drives work with precisely applied electric bursts. Besides boosting speed, such a method would eliminate a significant source of mechanical failure.
Racetrack' memory could gallop past the hard disk [New Scientist]
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