Scientists from England, Russia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands came up with a new speedy way of storage - Laser-switched magnetic storage. This storage method is 1000 times faster than the conventional hard drive data storage method. In the hard drives we switch a magnetic region using a magnetic field but in Laser-switched magnetic storage we simply switch a ferrimagnetic nanoisland using a Laser.

Researchers used alloy of iron and gadolinium to create ferrimagnetic nanoislands region. This region was then struck by a 60-femtosecond laser caused the magnetism to switch. This whole switching process takes only a nanoisland five picoseconds. This speedy state transition allows gigabytes or terabytes per second storage instead of megabytes per second.

The density of a conventional hard drive is about three terabits per square inch. However, ferrimagnetic nanoislands have more density as 53 terabits per square inch. It means 15 terabytes per platter instead of 3 terabytes per platter. Clearly, a more speedy and more storage effective technique for data.

However, Laser-Switched Magnetic Storage Technology still needs years to get in action practically. We are not seeing Laser storage swapping current hard disks in near future because researchers gave us the method to write but not to read. Apart from this, ferrimagnetic nanoisland are larger in size.