Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage that would enable a device such as an iPod to store about half a million songs -- or 3,500 films -- and cost far less to produce, the article adds. IBM says that devices which use the new technology would require much less power, would run on a single battery charge for "weeks at a time", and would last for decades.

IBM is touting "racetrack" memory uses the "spin" of an electron to store data, and can operate far more quickly than regular hard drives. Racetrack memory is an experimental non-volatile memory device under development at IBM's Almaden Research Center by a team led by Stuart Parkin, as well as teams at various other locations. In early 2008 a 3-bit version was successfully demonstrated.

Currently digital data is story in two main types of devices, magnetic hard disk drives, and solid state random access memories. The former stores data cheaply but, since it relies on the mechanical rotation of a disk, is slow and somewhat unreliable. The latter allows rapid access to data but the cost is about 100 times higher per bit than a magnetic disk drive.

Here's what Almaden Research Center has to say about racetrack memory: "We are working on a radically new storage-memory technology based on recently discovered spintronic phenomena. One of these is a means of using spin currents to directly manipulate the magnetic state of nano-scale magnetic regions -- magnetic domain walls -- within magnetic nano-wires. This device, the magnetic race-track, is a powerful storage-class memory which promises a solid state memory with the cost and storage capacities rivaling that of magnetic disk drives but with much improved performance and reliability. This could provide another revolution in our ability to access and manipulate digital information."

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