Functionalized Magnetic Nanomaterials for Data Storage Applications

The data analytics and artificial intelligence have increased demand for high-density data storage devices. Every year, the amount of data recorded increased due to advancements in data digitization. The method, mechanism, and materials used to advance data storage devices improve every year. The demand for low-cost data storage fueled the rapid increase in areal density, as well as the rapid decrease in size and cost per gigabyte of data. Magnetic recording and storage technology evolved from magnetic tape to hard disk drives (HDD), which is a type of magnetic random-access memory (MRAM). Despite the development of other technologies for data recording and storage, magnetic-based data storage continues to grow in area density, packing more reading and writing heads and disks into a single drive. Researchers have made consistent efforts to increase the capacity of magnetic recording media, which has resulted in modern HDDs based on perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), heat-assisted MR (HAMR), 2D MR (TDMR), and heated-dot MR (HDMR). The areal density of modern technologies increased from 1 TB/in2 (PMR) to 10 TB/in2 (HDMR). A diverse range of magnetic materials and methods are required for further advancement of magnetic recording and storage. This chapter discusses the various methods for developing magnetic materials, surface functionalization which is required to improve the performance/areal density of magnetic-based storage tools, and their progresses.