ExtremeTech
Graphene Could Radically Improve Hard Drives, If We Could Only Make the Stuff
By Joel Hruska on June 9, 2021 at 7:30 am
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It’s been a while since we talked about graphene. While the substance drove a wave of innovation and discovery some years ago, practical problems with manufacturing have kept it out of most products. Researchers have discovered that it could be phenomenal for hard drives, but we’ll have to solve a lot of problems with the material before that can happen.
Hard drive manufacturers have turned to increasingly esoteric methods of improving performance and capacities. Helium-filled hard drives are common in data centers and enterprise markets. Using helium inside these drives reduced their operating temperatures and allowed manufacturers to fit more platters into the same physical space, partly by reducing the space between each platter. More recently, drive manufacturers have adopted support for technologies like HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) and MAMR (Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording).