Dr. Stuart Parkin and colleagues at IBM have recently published a paper in Science introducing a new type of storage technology dubbed ‘racetrack memory’.

The memory uses something called spintronics which uses the storage of bits generated by the magnetic spin of electrons rather than their charge to identify each as “on” or “off”. This new storage solution offers some advantages over the most popular current options. It’s faster than traditional hard disk drives and has a lower failure rate since there are no moving parts.

Also, unlike current Flash-based solid state drives there is an infinite number of read and writes since using the memory creates no wear. The solid state drives being used today wear out a little bit each time they are written to, and although they are more stable than HDDs, they do have a finite number of reads and writes.

Some other advantages touted by the IBM research paper is that the racetrack memory has a lower power consumption than current storage solutions and is more scalable, allowing much more memory to be stored in the same amount of space than the Flash SSD technology would allow.

The racetrack memory appears to be a great solution but it’s not quite as close to a reality as the Phase Change memory we heard about last month. Like many of the cool things like this we hear about it might not become a reality for another ten years and according to researchers they still have “…a long way to go.”

ChannelWeb