IBM seeks end to conventional HDDs

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in hardware on (#2S3Q)
story imageIBM, 1950s inventor of modern hard drives, is said to be working on a new technology to replace their creation.
Saving files to memory is something that's supposed to be mostly invisible for the end user. We don't need to think about it; it just has to work. But whether it's a solid-state or hard disk drive, conventional storage solutions have their limitations -- namely, speed, rewritability and durability. A team at IBM Research's Almaden facility in California has a cure for all of that and it's called "racetrack memory."
The new technology is said to be far faster than solid state, and far more durable.
Reply 4 comments

That'd be nice (Score: 2, Funny)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-09-05 21:32 (#2S3V)

I'd love to see IBM ship some hot new tech. Seems like it's been a long time.

Oldest drive I've use: IBM 10Meg hard drive. Used it as an end table. It was short of 3' tall and weighed about 100 pounds.

Low on details (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-06 10:59 (#2S3Z)

Unfortunately the article is low on details.

I get that it is yet another technology aiming at nonvolatile memory. But how does it compare to all the other technologies, like MRAM, FRAM, FeRAM, ...

In short: Why should I assume that this is the future of nonvolatile memory, and not one of the other candidates?

Or at least give us the relevant data points, so we can dig up the same data for other contenders and do the comparison ourselves.
What is the read speed? Write speed? Durability of the stored information? How much energy does it cost to write a bit? To read a bit? Is it random access, or is it just erasable blocks like in Flash?