A Stanford University project concluded that hard-disk drives could become unstable at very high speeds.
Many technologies perform well in laboratory tests and wow attendees viewing conference demos. But in a recent test by some scientists, the foundation for our dominant storage systems was under attack.
A project at Stanford University labs led by some of the university’s researchers, a scientist from the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow, and engineers from hard-disk drive leader Seagate Technologies LLC concluded that hard-disk drives could become unstable at very high speeds.
The researchers used a particle accelerator to blast electrons at almost the speed of light at magnetic material used in hard-disk drives. Scrambled patterns left behind on the material were evidence of eventual hard disk drives that could someday, many years from now, produce garbled information.
News source: InformationWeek
