Speedy storage with frickin' LASERS (and busted geek)

Throw me a bone here! It's Friday's IT Blogwatch: in which researchers speed up hard drives. Not to mention a three-month sting operation to snare a Geek Squad technician stealing from hard drives...

Chris Mellor has gathered here before him the world's deadliest assassins:

Researchers have demonstrated disk write speeds one hundred times faster than current hard drives. The method uses a laser to heat the recording surface and alter its magnetic field. There is no equivalent read speed increase though.

According to a report in Science Now, Dutch scientists at Radboud University Nijmegen used a laser to send flashes of polarized light to a 5-micron-wide spot on a disk surface which was heated. The sheer angular momentum of the photons hitting the recording surface was then able to flip the magnetic field if the light was polarized one way, but left it unaltered if polarized in the other direction. A traditional magnetic field reader was then able to detect binary ones or zeroes accordingly.

This shows the promise of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) ... However, there are problems to be resolved ... the read component of the disk head remains magnetic and there is, as yet, no technology promising a hundredfold increase in read speed. [read more]

Doug Aamoth -- deceased, ham sandwich:

An egghead at Raboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands’ third biggest party school) has published a paper describing a method of using dynamic, polarized light to write and retrieve hard drive data at blazingly fast speeds - up to 100x faster than conventional hard drive speeds.
...
One current roadblock is the fact that laser beam’s footprint is about 5 microns wide, much larger than other data tranferral methods. Daniel Stanciu (the aforementioned egghead) claims that they should be able to reduce the laser’s footprint to about 10 nanometers within a decade.
...
Long story, short: in a decade, you might have a super fast hard drive. Exciting indeed! [read more]

Why must Mark Wilson be surrounded by frickin' idiots?:

But any too-good-to-be-true technology has its caveats ... in a supreme case of irony, this new technology will do nothing to affect reading speeds, meaning that accessing the written information won't see a speed boost. Still, we're always hopeful of new innovations on existing media formats.  [read more]

When Phil Berardelli gets upset people DIE:

The technique works because the photons transmitted by the laser actually carry angular momentum, allowing them to interact with the hard drive. Also, each laser pulse heats a tiny space on the disk just enough to make changing its polarity--thereby storing a bit of data--a little easier. The key is reversing the polarity of the laser pulses, which can produce the equivalent of either a 1 or a 0 of binary code on the disk storage medium. [read more]

But Jamey demands the sum OF 1 MILLION DOLLARS:

Yeah, this is great ... Except that it really doesn't help that much! Hard drives have gotten bigger, and bigger, and bigger over the last 20-30 years. But they don't feel that much faster. They've become wonders at streaming huge blobs of contiguous data out - so why do databases need huge steaming bloody chunks of RAM cache? Because the random access times suck and really haven't gotten that much better!
...
Sequential read speed is kinda nice, but I do need to do random accesses sometimes! I listen to my nice little 2TB RAID array all the time, as the heads move back and forth singing their little song. [read more]

Sake it to me, imsabbel:

Actually, this couldnt have less to do with data storage ... On the other hand is the switching of magnetic domains by the polarity of a circular pulse an archivement in itself. But of course fundamental research doesnt interest anybody, so they have to create a stupid "next storage medium" out of it. [read more]

Driftglass knows a lot's changed since 1967:

Celebrate, my friends, for being witness to a revolution which shall surely usher in a Second Third Fourth Fifth New Golden Age of ultrafast porn storage and retrieval. [read more]

Buffer overflow:

Around the Net

• Andrew Conry-Murray: How Much Used IT Gear Is Counterfeit?
• Ryan Block: Apple's little problem with ripping off artists
• The Next Net: Human-Powered Search Already Popular in Korea
• DrunkenData.com: Some interesting stats on mobile computing disk (in)security
• Andy, ITGuy: FTP is Secure?
• IFace Thoughts: Cost Of Failure And Innovation
• Craig Borysowich: Establishing a Test Environment
• Ryan Paul: Red Hat wants interoperability without patent pledges, Microsoft says no
• Scobleizer: Twitter vs. Pownce

Around Computerworld

• Mitch Betts: Mossberg calls IT departments "regressive and poisonous" forces impeding new technology adoption
• Robert L. Mitchell: It's a dog food bowl. It's a UPS. It's both!
• Michael R. Farnum: Iron Mountain guy not any fun? Here's a way to mess with your boss!
• Shark Tank: Stop confusing the issue with facts!
• Douglas Schweitzer: I always say, "if it's free, it's for me!"
• Shark Bait: A first time for everything

Previously in IT Blogwatch

• How to iPhone sans AT&T (and incompetent terrorists)
• Mass. confusion: ODF vs. OpenXML (and hicks vs. yuppies)
• Google is evil, or just sick? (and stop getting shot)
• If it's Friday, it must be iPhone-iPhone-iPhone-iPhone (and 50 YouSpoofs)
• Is this the real life, at Google? (Is this just fantasy?)
• Older posts

And finally... Busted! Geek Squad geek steals porn from customer's PC

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk. He'll never be the head of a major corporation.