New implementation of graphene based technology could multiply the storage density tenfold on HDD's

[Maheegan]

Summary

 

Researchers at Cambridge University have discovered, that if the coating on HDD's is switched from carbon based to graphene based, it could noticeably increase the wear and corrosion resistance of HDD's, possibly increasing the storage density from 1 Tb/in2 to 4-10Tb/in2.

 

Quotes

Quote

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.

 

My thoughts

I'm by no means an engineer, just an enthusiast builder and beginner-level programming student.

But since there has long been discussion about what the fate of HDD's will be in the future, this new technology could even further cement their place as a even more cost-efficient way to have immense amounts of storage spaces. The main benefit of SSD over HDD still stands; they have faster write/read speeds, but as a storage disk, HDD still has its place, and will have for the forseeable future..

 

Sources

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22687-y.pdf

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/ultra-high-density-hard-drives-made-with-graphene-store-ten-times-more-data

[LAwLz]

I'll belive it when I see it in products. 

There are so many "revolutionary" discoveries that promise major breakthroughs that just end up being impractical for various reasons. 

[Lurick]

20 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I'll belive it when I see it in products. 

There are so many "revolutionary" discoveries that promise major breakthroughs that just end up being impractical for various reasons. 

But but but GRAPHINE!!!!!!

It's so revolutionary bro!!

 

[jaslion]

26 minutes ago, Lurick said:

But but but GRAPHINE!!!!!!

It's so revolutionary bro!!

 

Muh carbon nanotubes!!!!

[cj09beira]

not sure how pratical graphene would be here, hdd's are hyper optimized to reduce cost as much as possible where ever possible, and considering the difficulty the industry has had in using graphene anywhere i doubt it will be useful, i would much prefer we either increase the size of the drives or the height 

[leclod]

1 hour ago, Maheegan said:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22687-y.pdf

Did you notice the "+ bit patterned media" at the end (or is this already common knowledge ?)

[Doobeedoo]

Cool and all, but for consumer space really SSDs are a thing so cheaper with higher storage over time is what matters.

[xAcid9]

Still waiting for my 1 Terahurtz graphene CPU.

[Mark Kaine]

I still dont know why magneto optical (discs) wasnt a bigger success, that seemed so good in many ways, especially longevity…

 

i know, capacity and speed wasnt great, but that could have surely been improved up on?

 

i kinda blame the whole anti minidisc campaign of the music industry back then… 

[ravenshrike]

41 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

not sure how pratical graphene would be here, hdd's are hyper optimized to reduce cost as much as possible where ever possible, and considering the difficulty the industry has had in using graphene anywhere i doubt it will be useful, i would much prefer we either increase the size of the drives or the height 

 

Right now the process requires 4 separate machines, a bath in distilled water, and multiple applications to coat a single platter more than once. It also requires cooling the copper/graphene disk application medium to room temp from a high temp in vacuum which would be rather slow. So a laborious, high energy, time consuming process with no easy way to implement robotically.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

1 hour ago, Doobeedoo said:

Cool and all, but for consumer space really SSDs are a thing so cheaper with higher storage over time is what matters.

Any yet are so much more expensive/gb, and over 10tb ssds don't exist for consumers.

Imagine getting a 200tb HDD tho, that would be cool (expensive, bit cool)

[Doobeedoo]

4 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

Any yet are so much more expensive/gb, and over 10tb ssds don't exist for consumers.

Imagine getting a 200tb HDD tho, that would be cool (expensive, bit cool)

I know, but in consumer space it's really SSD only now who ever is buying a PC or laptop. Most are fine with like 1TB or so. These super high capacity HDDs will be more server space and such.

[SeriousDad69]

3 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

I know, but in consumer space it's really SSD only now who ever is buying a PC or laptop. Most are fine with like 1TB or so. These super high capacity HDDs will be more server space and such.

A 200TB HDD would be worthless unless they also found a way to make them run like 8X faster lol. Picture trying to fill/drain a swimming pool with a straw. Even 20TB HDDs are too big for their current speed imo

[Helpful Tech Witch]

3 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

I know, but in consumer space it's really SSD only now who ever is buying a PC or laptop. Most are fine with like 1TB or so. These super high capacity HDDs will be more server space and such.

Still, increasing density should reduce the price/gb(instead of 3or 4 platters, you just need one) lower capacity drives in the consumer space would be great.

A hdd is still plenty fine for a game drive, if I had the option to keep hdds in my system (there's reasons I can't), I would. Having only SSD storage is gonna be expensive.

[Doobeedoo]

2 minutes ago, SeriousDad69 said:

A 200TB HDD would be worthless unless they also found a way to make them run like 8X faster lol. Picture trying to fill/drain a swimming pool with a straw. Even 20TB HDDs are too big for their current speed imo

Yeah I know, I'm sure they'll have their space in enterprise and some cold storage. But yeah, we've seen multi-actuator HDDs as well as hybrid to aid in speed.

[Doobeedoo]

1 minute ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

Still, increasing density should reduce the price/gb(instead of 3or 4 platters, you just need one) lower capacity drives in the consumer space would be great.

A hdd is still plenty fine for a game drive, if I had the option to keep hdds in my system (there's reasons I can't), I would. Having only SSD storage is gonna be expensive.

I mean yeah, if you need multi TB storage now HDD is there and will be fine. Though 1TB SSD now is fairly well priced. We'll get there.

[SeriousDad69]

1 hour ago, Doobeedoo said:

Cool and all, but for consumer space really SSDs are a thing so cheaper with higher storage over time is what matters.

By the time SSDs match HDDs in price to GB I'd imagine they'd be storing so many bits per cell that reliability, consistency and speed would be suspect.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

4 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

I mean yeah, if you need multi TB storage now HDD is there and will be fine. Though 1TB SSD now is fairly well priced. We'll get there.

It's still like 100-150$/TB for ssds, you can get 2tb drives for 60$. We will get there, but hdds will stick around, even in the consumer space, as 30$/TB is a lot less than 150$/Tb.

Yeah, both will go down, but still.

[Doobeedoo]

Just now, HelpfulTechWizard said:

It's still like 100-150$/TB for ssds, you can get 2tb drives for 60$. We will get there, but hdds will stick around, even in the consumer space, as 30$/TB is a lot less than 150$/Tb.

Yeah, both will go down, but still.

True, that depends on person to person how much they will feel fine with for now. Laptops only ship with SSDs for a while now. PCs all have SSDs too as boot, some addition HDD but yeah.

Hopefully not lower quality SSDs for cheaper in future, but proper quality with lower price.

[StDragon]

1 hour ago, SeriousDad69 said:

A 200TB HDD would be worthless unless they also found a way to make them run like 8X faster lol. Picture trying to fill/drain a swimming pool with a straw. Even 20TB HDDs are too big for their current speed imo

Not necessarily. Throughput increases with areal density. The more bits you can cram per unit of space, the more bits pass under the read/write head for the same given RPM.

 

Such issues can be mitigated with more platters and even dual actuators, but that just increases complexity and thus cost.

[KaitouX]

2 hours ago, SeriousDad69 said:

A 200TB HDD would be worthless unless they also found a way to make them run like 8X faster lol. Picture trying to fill/drain a swimming pool with a straw. Even 20TB HDDs are too big for their current speed imo

Depends on the use case, if you aren't using them as emergency backup or to replace a raid HDD and only using them to store games and other similar things there are no issues filling it, I was able to fill my 2 8TB HDDs without any issues as i had no requirement for it to be done in less than a day/week.

And quite often if the content used to fill the HDD is coming via internet, the internet speed or server speed is going to be the bottleneck, not the HDD speed.

[poochyena]

6 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I'll belive it when I see it in products. 

There are so many "revolutionary" discoveries that promise major breakthroughs that just end up being impractical for various reasons. 

honestly.. a lot of them actually do come around, its just it takes so long to make and introduced to consumers so slowly that we don't even notice it. Just look at battery and computer storage density in the past decade. huge improvements

[Lord Bloobus]

Might as well be made of unicorn horns and leprechaun tears until they actually make something that represents a product...

[Maheegan]

10 hours ago, leclod said:

Did you notice the "+ bit patterned media" at the end (or is this already common knowledge ?)

It was actually interesting information, thanks for pointing that out.

 

[Maheegan]

It has been interesting reading the thoughts of more knowledgeable people on this topic.