Maybe antiferromagnetism can speed up your hard drive?

August 27th, 2009

Magnetism makes the world go around, or at least for us hyper-connected types who would suffer brain damage if our data disappeared. But, in spite of the world’s reliance on magnetic storage, advances in the technology have been rather uneven. For instance, storage density has scaled quite nicely, and, along with it, the sensitivity of the read/write head. The odd men out in the line are the read and write speeds, which are still quite slow—even ignoring seek times that haven’t changed in the last eon.

There is a fundamental reason for this: magnetic storage relies on flipping the orientation of the spins in a magnetic material, and this is subject to the limits of the materials. However, researchers have demonstrated that they can exploit a different type of magnetic material to speed up the write speed, even though the change in magnetic orientation takes the same amount of time.