A revolutionary material for high-density data storage offers a more efficient and eco-friendly method for erasing and recycling data, presenting a viable alternative to hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and flash memory for the future.
This cost-effective polymer encodes data as tiny “dents,” forming a microscopic code with indentations that are only nanometers in size, signaling a capacity to hold significantly more data than conventional hard disk drives.
The Flinders University Chalker Lab’s new polymer can have its information deleted in just seconds using brief heat bursts, allowing for multiple reuse iterations, as detailed in a significant new study published in the journal Advanced Science.
“Our research opens up possibilities for utilizing simple, renewable polysulfides in probe-based mechanical data storage, presenting a potentially lower-energy, more sustainable alternative with higher data density,” states Abigail Mann, the lead author and PhD candidate from Flinders University’s College of Science and Engineering.
Constructed from affordable materials like sulfur and dicyclopentadiene, researchers employed an atomic force microscope and a scanning probe instrument to create and detect these indentations.
Professor Justin Chalker, the senior author, notes that this breakthrough exemplifies a new generation of polymers that can positively impact diverse industries.
“The demand for data storage solutions is rapidly increasing due to the growth of big data and artificial intelligence,” says Professor Chalker.
“There is an urgent need for innovative solutions to meet the escalating data storage requirements of the information age.”
“With current technologies like hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and flash memory facing data density limitations—essentially the quantity of information they can store in a given space—alternatives are becoming critical.”
The polymer chemistry team at Flinders University demonstrated data storage densities that surpass those of standard hard disk drives using this new method.
Additionally, their approach enabled repeated writing, reading, and erasing of data, which is a vital aspect of computing and data storage.
Major tech companies like IBM, LG Electronics, and Intel have previously explored the idea of data being stored as indentations on material surfaces. While this approach has shown promising advancements in storage solutions, challenges such as energy costs, material expenses, and complexity have hindered widespread adoption.
Senior researchers Dr. Pankaj Sharma and Dr. Christopher Gibson indicate that the Flinders polymer overcomes these hurdles with its distinctive physical structure, which uses mechanical force to create data indentations, along with a chemical structure that allows for quick restructuring of the polymer upon heating for easy erasure of that data.
“The affordability of the basic components (sulfur and dicyclopentadiene) makes this polymer an appealing option for future data storage innovations,” adds Samuel Tonkin, a PhD candidate from the Chalker Lab.