Next big thing for hard drives: self-assembling polymers

University of Texas at Austin boffins are touting an advance in materials which could help squeeze five times as much data onto hard drives. At a Terabit per square inch, data density is pretty impressive, but it’s getting difficult to put the magnetic elements of hard drives any closer together without them starting to affect …

[Martin Budden]

I think Keith Haring has prior art on this.

[Dave 126]

Alan Turing worked on the subject of 'self organisation':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction%E2%80%93diffusion_system#Two-component_reaction.E2.80.93diffusion_equations

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Shrinking the font size on stone tablets

This two dimensional surface nanotechnology is cool but the third dimension in hard drives remains enormous. Memory circuits that could be laid down in thin layers would have more storage even if the two dimensional density of each layer is very low. More research there, please.

[John Smith 19]

the question is how *much* patterning is required.

A key reason HDD cost per bit is lower than than semiconductor storage is the *very* simple patterning requirements.

This sounds good as long as they are no more complex than existing procedures.

Anything needing sub micrometre imaging would be a complete fail.

OTOH copolymers imply (potentially) magnet elements down to atomic cluster sizes(part of one polymer) *properly* separated by controlled numbers of "insulating" layers (of other polymer).

That said depth remains *the* unexplored dimension of HDD storage, possibly because no one seems to have found a way to do depth selection in the way wavelength selection can be done with multiple layers in a Blu-ray disk.

[Old Handle]

Interesting.

It looks remarkably similar to what spilled linseed oil does after a while.