Ultra-High-Density Hard Drives Made With Graphene Store 10x More Data

https://scitechdaily.com ^ | By UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE | JUNE 11, 2021

[Red Badger]

Graphene can be used for ultra-high density hard disk drives (HDD), with up to a tenfold jump compared to current technologies, researchers at the Cambridge Graphene Centre have shown.

The study, published in Nature Communications, was carried out in collaboration with teams at the University of Exeter, India, Switzerland, Singapore, and the US.

HDDs first appeared in the 1950s, but their use as storage devices in personal computers only took off from the mid-1980s. They have become ever smaller in size, and denser in terms of the number of stored bytes. While solid state drives are popular for mobile devices, HDDs continue to be used to store files in desktop computers, largely due to their favorable cost to produce and purchase.

HDDs contain two major components: platters and a head. Data are written on the platters using a magnetic head, which moves rapidly above them as they spin. The space between head and platter is continually decreasing to enable higher densities.

Currently, carbon-based overcoats (COCs) – layers used to protect platters from mechanical damages and corrosion – occupy a significant part of this spacing. The data density of HDDs has quadrupled since 1990, and the COC thickness has reduced from 12.5nm to around 3nm, which corresponds to one terabyte per square inch. Now, graphene has enabled researchers to multiply this by ten.

The Cambridge researchers have replaced commercial COCs with one to four layers of graphene, and tested friction, wear, corrosion, thermal stability, and lubricant compatibility. Beyond its unbeatable thinness, graphene fulfills all the ideal properties of an HDD overcoat in terms of corrosion protection, low friction, wear resistance, hardness, lubricant compatibility, and surface smoothness.

Graphene enables two-fold reduction in friction and provides better corrosion and wear than state-of-the-art solutions. In fact, one single graphene layer reduces corrosion by 2.5 times.

Cambridge scientists transferred graphene onto hard disks made of iron-platinum as the magnetic recording layer, and tested Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) – a new technology that enables an increase in storage density by heating the recording layer to high temperatures. Current COCs do not perform at these high temperatures, but graphene does. Thus, graphene, coupled with HAMR, can outperform current HDDs, providing an unprecedented data density, higher than 10 terabytes per square inch.

“Demonstrating that graphene can serve as protective coating for conventional hard disk drives and that it is able to withstand HAMR conditions is a very important result. This will further push the development of novel high areal density hard disk drives,” said Dr Anna Ott from the Cambridge Graphene Centre, one of the co-authors of this study.

A jump in HDDs’ data density by a factor of ten and a significant reduction in wear rate are critical to achieving more sustainable and durable magnetic data recording. Graphene based technological developments are progressing along the right track towards a more sustainable world.

Professor Andrea C. Ferrari, Director of the Cambridge Graphene Centre, added: “This work showcases the excellent mechanical, corrosion and wear resistance properties of graphene for ultra-high storage density magnetic media. Considering that in 2020, around 1 billion terabytes of fresh HDD storage was produced, these results indicate a route for mass application of graphene in cutting-edge technologies.”

Reference: “Graphene overcoats for ultra-high storage density magnetic media” by N. Dwivedi, A. K. Ott, K. Sasikumar, C. Dou, R. J. Yeo, B. Narayanan, U. Sassi, D. De Fazio, G. Soavi, T. Dutta, O. Balci, S. Shinde, J. Zhang, A. K. Katiyar, P. S. Keatley, A. K. Srivastava, S. K. R. S. Sankaranarayanan, A. C. Ferrari and C. S. Bhatia, 17 May 2021, Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22687-y

[Bikkuri]

I almost bought one.. until I read that you MUST have a fakebook account to use it.

[Still Thinking]

The NSA’ll be able to replace that Utah server farm with a standard server closet.

[Still Thinking]

Now the search engines are so good, it is crazy to store info on disks.

Pretty sure the stuff on the search engines is stored on disks. Not an either-or situation.

[sauropod]

Bkmk

[MikelTackNailer]

SSDs are awesome but now aging HAS shown too many are breaking down far earlier than expected, so advances in HHD like this graphite material are most welcome for backup drives. The common DVD has some deterioration over time even if never used though marketed as the "forever" solution. Then BlueRay with the same PR BS.

I sure as hell wouldn't trust a "cloud" owned by some megalomaniac over-moneyed James Bond villain. Interchangeable chips for slots in our skulls will be here soon enough and we can dispense with the middle man technology for good. Even scarier was "Johnny Mnemonic" plugging entire systems into his brain via a cable. Be well.