Abstract
Hard disk drives (HDDs) are used as secondary storage in digital electronic devices owing to low cost and large data storage capacity. Due to the exponentially increasing amount of data, there is a need to increase areal storage densities beyond ~1 Tb/in2. This requires the thickness of carbon overcoats (COCs) to be <2 nm. However, friction, wear, corrosion, and thermal stability are critical concerns below 2 nm, limiting current technology, and restricting COC integration with heat assisted magnetic recording technology (HAMR). Here we show that graphene-based overcoats can overcome all these limitations, and achieve two-fold reduction in friction and provide better corrosion and wear resistance than state-of-the-art COCs, while withstanding HAMR conditions. Thus, we expect that graphene overcoats may enable the development of 4–10 Tb/in2 areal density HDDs when employing suitable recording technologies, such as HAMR and HAMR+bit patterned media
Highlights
Hard disk drives (HDDs) are used as secondary storage in digital electronic devices owing to low cost and large data storage capacity
While various devices are used to store digital information, e.g., tape[2] and flash drives[3,4], hard disk drives (HDDs) remain the primary choice as a secondary storage devices, due to their low cost 10 TB with 3.5 inch HDDs3
While heat assisted magnetic recording technology (HAMR) appears to be a solution to all issues, such as small grain size, high magnetic anisotropy, and writability, and paves the way to increasing areal density (AD), it raises concerns on the thermal stability of carbon overcoats (COCs) against laser irradiation[28,29,30]
Summary
The thickness and roughness of 1–4LG are measured by Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), as discussed in Supplementary Note 5 This shows that the thickness of 4LG on HDM is ~2.1 nm (Supplementary Fig. 3), well below that of the current commercial COC. Reference 11 used FCVA to deposit ~1.5–2 nm carbon films for protection of Co-alloy-based HDM and reported low COF ~0.25, wear, and corrosion. To examine the corrosion protection efficiency of 1–4LG and compare their performance with state-of-the-art COCs, the corrosion of different uncoated- and coated-HDM, exposed to an electrolyte solution ~0.1 M NaCl similar to that used in refs. The higher corrosion protection in 2–4LG with respect to
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