With the recent news that a Scottish boffin had come up with a new memory system that could revolutionise the portable storage industry, and offer MP3 players up to 150 times their current memory, IBM have revealed they’re looking at new development technologies as well.

It has often been thought that flash memory devices could replace hard drives completely once the price of flash memory falls to a competitive level. IBM however say that can beat the flash memory for storage, predicting a new technology entirely inside the next ten years.

Their new invention is said to be named ‘Racetrack memory’, and they’re claiming it will be extremely stable yet have lightening fast load times.

The new system is said to work using something called ‘Spintronics’, which means it stores its data via the spin of electrons, instead of the electronic charge which flash memory uses.

IBM says the real advantage with their new technology is that it has no wear-out mechanism, so it can be used, re-used and used again without ever wearing out. Flash drives will eventually wear out after a thousand or so rewrites.

IBM say the storage capacity of Racetrack will allow MP3 players to store up to 500,000 tracks or 3,500 movies. That’s half a million songs, on a portable MP3 player!

In addition to the increased storage IBM claim they can run on just a single battery for weeks, which might spell bad news for companies such as Energizer and Duracell.

There is still way to go before we’re likely to see this technology in the shops though as IBM say they’re looking at sometime within the next decade.