Mobile phones, iPods and other consumer devices may soon be able to hold a hundred times more information than they do at present thanks to a breakthrough in storage technology.
Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage which 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.
Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage which 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.
In a paper published, said that devices which use the new technology would require much less power, would run on a single battery charge for "weeks at a time", and would last for decades. So-called 'racetrack' memory uses the 'spin' of an electron to store data, and can operate far more quickly than regular hard drives.
Like flash memory - the most advanced type of memory for small devices such as mobile phones - it has no moving parts, meaning that the problems associated with mechanical reliability are dramatically reduced.
Unlike flash, however, it can 'write data' - or store information - extremely quickly, and does not have the 'wear out' mechanism that means flash memory drives can only be used a few thousand times before they wear out.
"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," Stuart Parkin, the IBM fellow who led the research, said. At present the most capacious iPod - the 160GB iPod Classic - can store 40,000 songs. For nearly fifty years, scientists have explored the possibility of storing information inside the walls that exist between magnetic domains, but to date manipulating such walls has been too expensive and complicated to achieve significant results.
In his paper, Mr Parkin describes a milestone in which he and his team were able to store data in columns of magnetic material arranged on the surface of a silicon wafer. The information moves around the columns at high speed, giving the technology its racetrack name.
IBM said the technology was still "exploratory" at this stage, but that it expected devices which used it to be on the market within ten years.
2 comments:
Ten years is too long. I can't wait to get hold of the device. Anyway, good things come to those who wait. Thanks
Yes you are right!
But you know technology is something like it always change and new innovations make it happened, right? In the other hand we have to be patient to take the maximum out of anything...
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