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Laser Hard Drives Could Someday Mean Blazing Fast Performance

Posted 01/15/09 at 02:12:54 PM  by Andy Salisbury

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Research into the field of light powered computing has made some considerable strides as of late. Most notably, the science behind a laser powered hard drive has been more solid than ever before.

A laser powered hard drive would work on the principles of picosecond pulse lasers working where magnetic read/write heads would (something that was considered to be impossible until recently). Drives working on these fundamentals would provide a 1 TB/s transfer rate with their first generations, and others after that would reach speeds of 100TB/s and over.

Supposedly, this technology will be available within only five years, but like most laser technology, we’ll believe it when we see it.

COMMENTS:3
TAGS: Hard Drive, HDD, hardware, consumer electronics, laser
COMMENTS
avatarYeah, I'll hold my breath on

Submitted by I Jedi on Fri, 01/16/2009 - 10:34am

Yeah, I'll hold my breath on this one, too, but I do hope it eventually comes forth. 

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avatarDamn

Submitted by STorpedo on Thu, 01/15/2009 - 11:37pm

The storage field is killing it recentley, as if 500gb increases in storage weren't enough, we got 300gb raptors now, io fusion is coming out with a PCI-4x 80gb storage with 800mb/s read, ocz vertex ssds better than intel's and for half the price. Having said that, I think this tech could be a bit late to the party, 1tb/s reads are coming in at least a year or two, and SSDs sound a heck of a lot more dependable, and smaller. Also laser tech sounds very expensive, especially with precision reading that 1tb/s requires, and by that time SSDs will be cheap as chips.

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avatarPretty interesting tech

Submitted by jcollins on Thu, 01/15/2009 - 12:43pm

Pretty interesting tech news. I'm assuming the 1TB transfer rate is theoretical though, and that real world performance would be less.   I'm also doubtful that the physical technology is up to 1TB transfer rates (considering it's in the 1 GB range with the really high end drives (and usually much less)).

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