Bacterial DVD Holds 50TB 268
CAMags writes to tell us that a Harvard Professor is claiming to have developed a new variant of a protein called bacteriorhodopsin (bR) that, when layered on a DVD, can store up to 50TB of data. From the article: "The light-activated protein is found in the membrane of a salt marsh microbe Halobacterium salinarum and is also known as bacteriorhodopsin (bR). It captures and stores sunlight to convert it to chemical energy. When light shines on bR, it is converted to a series of intermediate molecules each with a unique shape and color before returning to its 'ground state.'"
Re:I read this in a science book (Score:5, Informative)
Vaporware (Score:2, Informative)
Italics.....come on.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:50 TB? (Score:3, Informative)
I wonder how you know these numbers are exaggerated.
That's not a huge hurdle. I can easily envision a drive with more than a dozen fully-independant laser assemblies. Not only do you get 12X+ throughput, but you can get seek times ~12X faster/smaller. And if you get desperate for performance, you can spin that platter of laser assemblies at 40X in the opposite direction the disc is spinning.
Plus increased data density on physical media means you'll see proportional increases in throughput.
Scientists should spend more time finding a cure for cancer, and not bother with all this fancy digital crap. Right?
What you want, is not what most people want. Video playback/encoding won't go any faster no matter how low you get the seek times, but having far smaller space to store it would be a huge problem/limitation.
If you need ridiculous seek times, grab more DDR RAM, store this data on a $130 4GB Flash card, get a high-end controller that can accept massive ammounts of battery-backed drive cache, etc.
Re:My God! (Score:2, Informative)
Only Problem Its Destructive Readout (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I bet these will have the same problem as CD-RW (Score:3, Informative)
It was a favourite model of protein scientists in the 80-es because it is one of the very few proteins that will easily form crystals. It is also extremely stable (for a protein) in its non-excited form. So if any photosensitive protein is ever used for storage it is possibly the best candidate.
Inorganic materials used by (first) DVD successors (Score:3, Informative)
Here's an article on a disk that stacks several different types, each of them inorganic:
TDK develops 200GB recordable Blu-Ray disc with six layers [newlaunches.com]
Re:I bet these will have the same problem as CD-RW (Score:4, Informative)
It's considered to be more time stable than hard drives, conventional mass-produced CD's and DVD's, flash-RAM, and others.