New polymer ramps up quest for better data storage

A new material for high density data storage can be erased and recycled in a more efficient and sustainable way, providing a potential alternative to hard disk drives, solid-state drives and flash memory in future.

The low-cost polymer stores data as ‘dents’, making a miniscule code in patterns, with the indents just nanometers in size – promising to store more data than typical hard disk drives.

The new Flinders University Chalker Lab polymer, which can have the information in it wiped in seconds by short bursts of heat and be reused several times, is described in a major new article in the prestigious international journal Advanced Science.

“This research unlocks the potential for using simple, renewable polysulfides in probe-based mechanical data storage, offering a potential lower-energy, higher density and more sustainable alternative to current technologies,” says first author and PhD candidate Abigail Mann, from the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University.

Made from low-cost materials, sulfur and dicyclopentadiene, the researchers used an atomic force microscope and a scanning probe instrument to make and read the indentations.

Senior author Professor Justin Chalker says the development is the latest example of new era polymers capable of making a difference to a wide range of industries.   

“The age of big data and artificial intelligence is increasingly driving demand for data storage solutions,” says Professor Chalker.

“New solutions are needed for the ever-growing computing and data storage needs of the information era.

“Alternatives are being sought to hard disk drives, solid-state drives and flash memory which are constrained by data density limits – or the amount of information they can store in a particular area or volume.”

Using the method, the polymer chemistry team at Flinders University demonstrated data storage densities that exceed typical hard disk drives.

The polymer chemistry method allowed for the data writing, reading and erasing to be repeated many times, which is important in computing and data storage.

The concept of storing data as indents on the surface of materials has been explored previously by computing giants such as IBM, LG Electronics and Intel. While this mechanical data storage strategy provided some very promising demonstrations and innovations in storage, the energy requirements, costs, and complexities of the data storage materials are some of the barriers to commercialising the technology.

Senior researchers Dr Pankaj Sharma and Dr Christopher Gibson say the Flinders polymer addresses these challenges with its unique physical structure that allows mechanical force to encode the data via an indentation, and a chemical structure that allows rapid reorganisation of the polymer upon heating to erase that indent.

“The low cost of the building blocks (sulfur and dicyclopentadiene) are an attractive feature that can support future development of the polymer in data storage applications,” adds Chalker Lab PhD candidate Samuel Tonkin.

The article, ‘Probe-Based Mechanical Data Storage on Polymers Made by Inverse Vulcanization’ (2024) by Abigail K Mann, Samuel J Tonkin, Pankaj Sharma, Christopher T Gibson and Justin M Chalker has been published in Advanced Science (Wiley). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202409438

Acknowledgements: The project was directed and supervised by Dr Pankaj Sharma, Dr Christopher Gibson and Professor Justin Chalker. Financial support for this research was provided by the Australian Research Council (DP200100090, DP230100587, and FT220100054). Key technical support and instrumentation essential for this research was provided by Flinders Microscopy and Microanalysis (FMMA), Adelaide Microscopy, and the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF).