Short burst of heat can make HDDs much faster

It was previously thought that heat could only assist in remagnetisation when used in conjunction with a magnetic field. It turns out that zapping a magnet with a laser for less than one trillionth of a second, momentarily raising the temperature by over 800 degrees Celsius, can have the same effect. The results were published today in the journal Nature Communications.

The researchers say this new method could be used to make hard drives capable of recording terabytes of information a second, which is hundreds of times faster than existing drives. The process also uses less energy than magnetic recording, meaning the new drives would be more energy efficient.