Magnetic media, in the form of disk and tape drives, has been the dominant way of storing bits. But the speed and low power of flash memory has been displacing it from consumer systems, and various forms of long-term memory are in development that are even faster. But a new paper suggests that magnetic media may still be competitive—you just have to stop reading and writing it with magnets.

Using a specific form of garnet and some ultrafast laser pulses, a Dutch-Polish team of researchers performed what they suspect is the fastest read/write of magnetic media ever. And, for good measure, the process was extremely energy efficient.

Heat is actually a problem for both hard drives and flash. Although it doesn’t create a problem in most consumer systems, dealing with excess heat is a major issue in data centers. The problem, according to the authors of the new paper, is one of scale. While we can calculate the minimum energy needed to flip a magnetic bit, we use much more than that to ensure that every bit gets written as intended. Eight orders of magnitude more, in fact. Most of that excess energy ends up dissipating into the environment, where it ends up as heat.