Overcoming Hard Drive Limitations

It looks like switching to ferroelectric designs of hard drives may just overcome the physical limitations faced by the ferromagnetic hard drives now in use.

Bits are currently stored in the orientation of tiny magnets, called ferromagnetic domains, on a hard drive platter. The smaller the domain, the easier it is for that orientation to be scrambled by temperature or stray electromagnetic fields.

But, ferroelectric materials use the orientation of the electric field to hold data, and a recent Nature Nanotechnology article reports tiny ferroelectric capacitors can hold the charge for about 3 days.