A lubricant called SHP could be used to speed up your hard drive, according to recent work done by PhD. candidate Wei Xiao in the University of Illinois.
The lubricant, which has to be able to cope with the 10,000-plus revolutions per minute typical in modern hard drive operation, provides a coating which shields the disk from damage and makes performance faster. A substance that is incredibly sticky is needed for this job, otherwise it will fly off of the disk.