Already known as the world's strongest material and a great solution for shrinking transistors, now researchers say it can also be used to make super-tough, super-small storage.

Researchers at Rice University demonstrated a graphite data storage medium that was only 10 atoms thick. They said it could provide many times the capacity of current flash memory and withstand temperatures (up to 200 C) that would make SSD memory disintegrate.

On the minus side, the researchers have only gotten an access time of 100 nanoseconds, about 10 times slower than SRAM. But they're confident that as they experiment more with the material, they'll be able to get that number down. [ComputerWorld]

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