Revolution ahead in data storage--IT wizards

Agence France-PresseLast updated 10:39am (Mla time) 11/01/2007

PARIS--The world's smallest hard drives have already shrunk to the size of a postage stamp, but nanoscale computing may soon make that achievement look elephantine, say some of the stars of information technology.

Breathtaking change is on the horizon in personal and industrial data storage, the experts say in a review of vanguard technology, published on Wednesday in the British journal Nature Materials.

The newest developments in "spintronics," for example, are poised to go beyond the electrical charge of classic electronics to harness the quantum "spin" state of electrons, writes Albert Fert, co-winner last month of the Nobel Prize for Physics.

That could usher in dramatic advances in hard disk storage capacity and date retrieval, says Fert. Along with Peter Gruenberg of Germany, Frenchman Fert was lauded for discovering the principle, called giant magnetoresistance (GMR), that lies at the heart of the past decade's most popular electronic devices, from iPods to cell phones to Blackberries.

Fert's new holy grail -- called Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM) -- could essentially collapse the disk drive and computer chip into one, vastly expanding both processing power and storage capacity."

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Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistive_effect