[windows2000] OT: Tests Find Theoretical Data Speed Limit
- From: "Jim Kenzig http://thin.net" <jimkenz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, windows2000@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 15:22:25 -0400
But I WANT a linear accelerator in my hard disks!
JK
Tests Find Theoretical Data Speed Limit
2 hours, 3 minutes ago Add Technology - AP to My Yahoo!
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=562&ncid=738&e=1&u=/ap/20040
421/ap_on_hi_te/computer_speed_limit
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer
If there is an article of faith in computer science, it's that everything
can keep getting faster and faster.
But scientists say they've discovered an apparent speed limit that will
restrict how quickly data can be written onto disks and then retrieved.
The good news: This limit is about 1,000 times faster than today's
state-of-the-art data storage devices.
When information is stored on disks, minuscule regions that make up each bit
of data are magnetized in one direction or its opposite, to represent a 0 or
a 1. Rewriting data involves sending an electromagnetic pulse that reverses
the spin of selected bits. Accelerate the pulse and you shorten the time
needed to store or rewrite information.
But if the pulses come too quickly and intensely, the high energy involved
makes some of the magnetic changes happen randomly instead of predictably
and reliably, according to a group of researchers writing in Wednesday's
edition of the journal Nature.
The scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator
at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic
material used to store computer data.
These pulses of energy traveled at nearly the speed of light, and lasted
just 2.3 picoseconds. A picosecond is a millionth of a millionth of a
second.
The researchers noticed that the magnetic patterns left behind were somewhat
chaotic, an unacceptable outcome when it comes to storing precise bits of
data.
The project was led by researchers at Stanford and included a scientist at
the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow and engineers at
disk-drive maker Seagate Technologies LLC.
The group was the first to examine the physics of magnetic data storage with
a particle accelerator, according to two scientists who were not involved in
the experiments, C.H. Back of Germany's University of Regensburg and Danilo
Pescia of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
In an e-mail interview, Pescia said the experiments were important in that
they showed that the speed of magnetic recording ? which already clocks in
at several billion bits, or gigabits, per second in the fastest hard
drives ? can still get 1,000 times faster.
"In order to go beyond this limit, some completely new technology will be
required, of which we do not know anything yet," Pescia wrote.
However, Seagate's chief technology officer, Mark Kryder, said the project
had few real implications for the data-storage industry.
"Certainly we are not going to start packaging linear accelerators into hard
disk drives, so the kinds of speeds achieved in these experiments would
never be observed in an actual recording device," Kryder said. "It's not
something that's going to impact anything we're contemplating in hard disk
drives."
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