The storage capacity of hard drives is certainly increasing and we have come a long way from the good old days where floppy disks could only store 1.44MB of data. However, as our media gets bigger, we are going to need hard drives that can store even larger amounts of data, and scientists think that graphene could be the answer.According to the researchers from the University of Cambridge, they have developed a new ultra-high density hard drive that has an ultra-thin coating of graphene that they say can store ten times the amount of data compared to current leading drives. This is because graphene is used to replace carbon-based overcoats which are usually used in hard drives.
As graphene is a material that is made of a one-atom thick layer of carbon, it allows these drives to hold greater storage density than normal. According to Cambridge Graphene Center researcher and study coauthor Anna Ott, “Demonstrating that graphene can serve as protective coating for conventional hard disk drives and that it is able to withstand [data recording] conditions is a very important result.”
This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen graphene used to improve existing technologies. In the past, we have seen how graphene can be used to improve the performance of speakers, and how batteries made of graphene have the potential to not only charge faster, but last longer. We’re not sure when we will start seeing hard drives made using graphene, but it is an interesting concept nonetheless.