This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes (thousands of Gigabytes) of information per second, hundreds of times faster than present hard drive technology," said York physicist Thomas Ostler in a paper published in the February edition of the Nature Communications journal. "As there is no need for a magnetic field, there is also less energy consumption."
In the paper, Ostler describes a system that uses a sub-picosecond laser pulse to quickly heat the magnetic medium to around 800 degrees Celsius for a brief moment. This heating significantly speeds up the process of reversing the magnetic polarity of a particular bit. Current hard drives use an external magnetic field applied to a spinning magnetic medium to invert the polarity of the two magnetic poles.
Source: Toms Hardware