IBM Finds Faster Way to Store Data

IBM Corp. has developed a way to store information 1,000 times faster than possible with today’s technology, using roughly half the power. Details on the advance, which is still at an early stage and won’t be available in storage products any time soon, will be published today in the journal Science.

IBM’s innovation involves flipping the positive and negative charges of a magnetic field as quickly as possible. The charges translate into a series of zeros and ones--binary code--that represent the information on a storage system. IBM said it still must overcome major hurdles before the technology can be used in hard drives, tape storage systems and floppy disks.

In each of the last two years, manufacturers have doubled the amount of information that can be stored in a given space while speeding up the rate at which it is recorded by 40%. That progress is limited by today’s technology, however, because tightly packing information ultimately slows how fast it can be stored.

IBM said it has found a way to overcome that barrier.

Storage systems have become a more important part of computer networks with the surging use of the Internet, which gives businesses and consumers access to large amounts of previously untapped information.