After decades of improvements to hard disk drive (HDD) technology, manufacturers are now close to taking the next big leap that will boost storage density to new levels. Using laser-assisted writes, manufacturers like Seagate are projecting 50+ TB HDDs by 2026 and 120+ TB HDDs after 2030. One part of the secret recipe is heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR).

One of the hurdles with implementing HAMR is finding a protective coating for the magnetic media that can handle this frequent heating while also being thinner than current coatings, so that the head can move even closer to the surface. According to a recent paper by N. Dwivedi et al. published in Nature Communications, this new protective coating may have been found in the form of sheets of graphene.

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