Get ready for much bigger hard drives.

The material graphene can be used to pack much more data into hard drives than current methods, researchers from the University of Cambridge found in a recent study. It is one of several new technologies that could make it possible to fit more data into hard drives as demand for storage grows.

"New applications are fueling and demanding enormous data sets," John Morris, chief technology officer of hard drive maker Seagate Technology, said in an email interview. "That's why hard drives are getting bigger. Whatever you send to the cloud — your photos, videos, personal and business documents — is on increasingly high-capacity hard drives."

Hard disk drives (HDDs) first appeared in the 1950s, but their use as storage devices in personal computers only really took off in the mid-1980s. They have become progressively smaller and denser in terms of the number of bytes stored. While solid-state drives are popular for mobile devices, HDDs are still used to store files in desktop computers, largely because they are relatively cheap to manufacture and purchase.