What’s so great about solid state drives anyway? They’re expensive and their storage capacity isn’t all that great compared to a regular hard drive either.

That’s just some of the complaints that people have against SSD devices, but the truth of the matter is, they’re compact, speedy little bastards that can transfer files lickety-split.

And now, they’re about to get even faster.

A team of scientists recently demonstrated a new method for writing data onto a storage device, using lasers, that made the process much faster than that of a regular spindle hard drive. How fast?

A thousand times faster.

That’s hundreds of gigabytes being transferred in seconds. You could swap all your legally acquired films and music before you even finish making a cup of coffee in that time.

As the researchers discovered, the process of eating up makes for a perfect method to transfer data, and what better source of heat than a laser? Dr Alexey Kimel explained it to PhysOrg;

For centuries it has been believed that heat can only destroy the magnetic order. Now we have successfully demonstrated that it can, in fact, be a sufficient stimulus for recording information on a magnetic medium.

The process uses 60 femtosecond pulses of laser — a duration of 60 quadrillionths of a second — to rapidly heat a tiny section of the ferrimganetic material that you find in hard drive platters.

The heat changes the state of magnetization, which encodes the data. Each write takes less than 5 picoseconds, or 5 trillionths of a second. While the team has that part figured out successfully, they still have to devise a method to read back the data accurately.

After all, who wants a thousand copies of that one dirty movie on their hard drive?