New Superpower of Graphene Revealed
Graphene can increase the capacity of hard disks by ten times
Has the price of your hard drive increased again?
Over the years, the development of the mechanical hard disk industry has been stagnant, but the price has remained high.
Although solid-state hard drives are now widely used, mechanical hard drives still occupy a place in the computing field.
The storage capacity of hard disks is of course increasing, but as our media needs become larger and larger, we need hard disks that can store a larger amount of data.
So can the storage capacity of the hard disk be improved?
Recently, researchers from the Graphene Center at the University of Cambridge found that:
Graphene can be used in ultra-high-density hard drives. Compared with current technology, the data storage capacity per square inch can be increased from the current 1Tb to 10Tb.
This means that the capacity has increased tenfold!
The research has been published in Nature Communications and was carried out by the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the University of Exeter, India’s CSIR-Institute of Advanced Materials and Processes, EPFL, National University of Singapore, and Argonne National Laboratory in the United States.
Next, let’s take a look at how graphene is used for mechanical hard drives.
How graphene is used for HDD
HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) first appeared in the 1950s, but their use as storage devices in personal computers did not begin to rise until the mid-1980s.
The hard disk consists of two main parts:
- The platters
- The heads.
The data is written on the disc by the magnetic head. When the disc rotates, the magnetic head will move rapidly above the disc several thousand revolutions per minute, and the magnetic head can be positioned on the designated position of the disc to perform data reading and writing operations.
Therefore, the size of the space between the head and the disk determines the storage density of the hard disk.
What is the size of the space in the middle?
The middle layer is called carbon-based coating (COC), which is a carbon-based material that can be used to protect the disc from mechanical damage and corrosion.
Since 1990, the data density of HDD has quadrupled, the data density has reached 1TB per square inch, and the thickness of the corresponding carbon-based coating has been reduced from 12.5nm to about 3nm.
If you want to further increase the data density, You have to consider what other materials can be thinner. Speaking of thinness, graphene has unparalleled thinness.
In addition, graphene has all the desirable properties of corrosion resistance, low friction, wear resistance, strong hardness, lubricant compatibility, and surface smoothness.
Therefore, the Cambridge researchers replaced the traditional commercial carbon-based coating with one to four layers of graphene.
Talking more is not helpful, and see what the actual effect is?
The researchers transferred graphene to a hard disk made of iron platinum as a magnetic recording layer and tested heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR).
HAMR can heat the recording layer to a higher temperature to increase the storage density, making the data bits smaller and more closely arranged together, while maintaining stability.
In addition, current carbon-based coatings cannot function at these high temperatures, but graphene can.
Researchers say that a single graphene layer can reduce corrosion by 2.5 times.
Therefore, the use of four-layer graphene-based COC in combination with other innovative technologies, such as HAMR and bit patterned magnetic recording (BPM), can far outperform current HDDs.
The final data density broke the record, the data density per square inch was astonishingly more than 10 TB.
The author of the study, Dr. Anna Ott from the Cambridge Graphene Center said:
It is very important to prove that graphene can be used as a protective coating for traditional hard disk drives and can withstand HAMR conditions, which will further promote the development of new high-density hard disk drives.
Professor Andrea C. Ferrari, Director of the Cambridge Graphene Center, also added:
This work demonstrates the excellent mechanical, corrosion, and wear resistance properties of graphene that can be used in ultra-high storage density magnetic media.
Conclusion
In 2020, HDD storage capacity will be approximately 1 billion terabytes. If it can be replaced with graphene, the potential is unlimited.
This time in data storage, the “king of new materials” graphene once again proved its magic.
Although many graphene products were in the concept of speculation before, I hope that this time it is not only a concept, let us look forward to graphene storage in our lives! After all, who doesn’t want their hard drive to be 10 times larger incapacity?
