Racetrack to Make Hard Drives Bigger, Stronger, Faster

By Greg McNevin

May 16, 2007: An international team of physicists has announced a major storage breakthrough that could drastically improve the speed, capacity and reliability of hard drives.

Working at the University of Hamburg in Germany, the team has managed to push magnetic regions along a wire at 110 metres per second using pulses of electricity – around 100 times faster than has been possible to date.

Data is stored in domains on the wire which are magnetically aligned to a binary one or zero position. When a nano pulse of electric current passes through, the domains move with them, past the “head” for reading.

Dubbed “Racetrack” memory by an IBM scientist in 2004, the technology could revolutionise the hard disk industry by removing moving parts from magnetic storage devices, making the drives more robust and more responsive overall.

While these benefits are also enjoyed by the rapidly emerging flash technology, one large benefit Racetrack memory has over flash is the cost of manufacture, which the team claims will be considerably less.

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