Hard drives 1000 times faster:

http://phys.org/news/2013-04-all-optical-magnetic-terahertz-speed-hard-ram.html

That would put HD's faster than present day RAM..

Fantastic. Hard disks are currently one of the main bottle necks in modern computers. Their speed has lagged behind everything else. Of course SSDs are set to replace them, but remain much more expensive.
Its not clear though from the article whether this technology would be placed on spinning discs or some other mechanism.

Originally posted by twhitehead
Fantastic. Hard disks are currently one of the main bottle necks in modern computers. Their speed has lagged behind everything else. Of course SSDs are set to replace them, but remain much more expensive.
Its not clear though from the article whether this technology would be placed on spinning discs or some other mechanism.

Did you read the comments? They discussed that issue and one dude showed the smallest nanolaser ever made, something around 25 nanometers. The idea there would be the assembly would not spin but be just like regular ram physically with of course completely different physics and would be in a chip, a large matrix of lasers and magnetic recording material. If so, it would come down to how big a chip you could build and communicate that fast with the outer world. The links to the rest of the computer could be lasers also, no wires and no capacitance issues so the speed would be just how fast you can switch lasers off and on and how fast photodetectors can operate which right out of the gate would be faster than copper wires.