New way of magnetic recording to lead to super fast hard drive

A team of scientists has found a new way of magnetic recording which will allow information to be processed hundreds of times faster than by current hard drive technology.In modern magnetic recoding technology, it has been believed that in order to record one bit of information by inverting the poles of a magnet, there was a need to apply an external magnetic field.But scientists at the University of York in Britain and their colleagues found they could record information using only heat, which is a previously unimaginable scenario.Writing in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications, they demonstrated that the inversion of magnetic poles can be achieved by using an ultrashort heat pulse."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," said Thomas Ostler, who is based at University of York and the senior researcher in this breakthrough."This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes (thousands of Gigabytes) of information per second, hundreds of times faster than present hard drive technology," he said, emphasizing the wonderful outlook of application.Furthermore, "as there is no need for a magnetic field, there is also less energy consumption."