Young researcher creates new roadmap for computer hard drives
Responding to consumer demand for increased computer hard drive memory, the research also has the potential to reduce the environmental footprint of the more than 2.5 billion hard drives currently estimated to be in use worldwide.
By 鈥榮hining鈥� a beam of electrons on special ceramic material, University of Sydney researchers have found a new way for increasing the memory capacity of our computer hard drives.
Results of the material science and engineering research have been published today in the American Physical Society's journal .
Lead author Zibin Chen, a PhD candidate at the University鈥檚 says: 鈥淚f you lined up all the world鈥檚 hard drives back-to-back, they would go around the globe 5 times, and hard drives are partly manufactured from non-biodegradable aluminium and other metals.
鈥淔inding a way to increase memory capability without increasing the hard drive size is a major challenge in this area.
鈥淭he project focussed on the materials science for memory storage. We have discovered that a high-energy electron beam with an omni-directional electric field does the job!
鈥淲e are proposing an approach that could reduce the current domain size by 100 times, resulting in a 100 times greater data storage capability.
鈥�This new materials science creates a roadmap that can be used by industry to create a next generation of better, greener, more stable computer memory,鈥� says ZiBin.
The PhD research was co-supervised by Professors Xiaozhou Liao and Simon Ringer from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies, whose work is part of the Faculty鈥檚 .
says: 鈥淭he most notorious cause of failure for computer hard drives is a head crash, where the 鈥榟ead鈥� of the device that hovers just above the rotating disk touches or scratches the data-storage platter surface. A head crash usually incurs severe data loss.
鈥淥ur approach requires no physical contact of a tip or any other manipulator with the data storage media and therefore avoids possible physical damage to the devices. 聽
explains: 鈥淎s materials engineers, we think a lot about how to stimulate local changes in the atomic-scale structure of materials so as to access remarkable new properties and behaviour.
鈥淲e are really excited to have discovered that applying these local electric fields with nanoscale precision can create a new paradigm for computer memory.鈥�