Scientists discover theoretical data storage speed limit

By Stuart Finlayson

News that scientists have discovered an apparent speed limit at which data can be stored and retrieved may disappoint many IT enthusiasts on first hearing, but the good news is that this optimum speed is around 1,000 times faster than the quickest storage device available today.

Engineers from hard disk drive vendor Seagate, together with researchers from Stanford University, used a particle accelerator to blast electrons at a piece of magnetic material of the type used to store data.

The way data is stored is by magnetising tiny regions of each bit of data in one direction or another, to represent a 0 or a 1. To rewrite the data, an electromagnetic pulse is administered to change the shape of the data. The speed of the pulse is inversely proportional to the time it takes to store or write data, so the faster the pulse, the shorter the time needed to rewrite or store data.

What the researchers found is that when the electromagnetic pulse reaches a certain speed, which was almost the speed of light, the magnetic changes start to occur at random, rather than predictably, rendering the device unable to store data precisely.

This still leave a long way to go for developers before they reach a plateau, by which time some completely new technology may have been invented. However, at present, this discovery is unlikely to have any real bearing on future development in the storage industry, as vendors are not about to start bundling particle accelerators with hard disk drives.

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