50,000 gigabytes DVD!!!!

[Dark Ruler]

http://in.tech.yahoo.com/060708/139/65pz8.html

Sydney, Jul 8 (ANI): An Indian born scientist in the US is working on developing DVD's which can be coated with a light -sensitive protein and can store up to 50 terabytes (about 50,000 gigabytes) of data.

Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston has claimed to have developed a layer of protein made from tiny genetically altered microbe proteins which could store enough data to make computer hard disks almost obsolete.

"What this will do eventually is eliminate the need for hard drive memory completely," ABC quoted Prof. Renugopalakrishnan, a BSc in Chemistry from Madras University and PhD in biophysics from Columbia/State University of New York, Buffalo, New York as saying.

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 colour before returning to its 'ground state'.

Since the intermediates generally only last for hours or days, Prof Renugopalakrishnan and his colleagues modified the DNA that produces bR protein to produce an intermediate that lasts for more than several years. They also engineered the bR protein to make its intermediates more stable at the high temperatures generated by storing terabytes of data.

This, they said, ultimately paved the way for a binary system to store data.

"The ground state could be the zero and any of the intermediates could be the one," he said.

Prof Renugopalakrishnan now opines that the protein layer could also allow DVDs and other external devices to store terabytes of information.

The new protein-based DVD will have advantages over current optical storage devices such as the Blue-ray as well, because the information is stored in proteins that are only a few nanometres across.

"The protein-based DVDs will be able to store at least 20 times more than the Blue-ray and eventually even up to 50,000 gigabytes (about 50 terabytes) of information. You can pack literally thousands and thousands of those proteins on a media like a DVD, a CD or a film or whatever," he said.

The high-capacity storage devices will be essential to the defence, medical and entertainment industries.

"You have a compelling need that is not going to be met with the existing magnetic storage technology," he added.



However, there's a flip side to it also.

"Science can be used and abused. Making large amounts of information so portable on high-capacity removable storage devices will make it easier for information to fall into the wrong hands. Information can be stolen very quickly. One has to have some safeguards there," he added.

The findings were presented at the International Conference on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Brisbane this week. (ANI)

[NoeOM]

Interesting notice,

there is no doubt that the future of storagin is now aimed to this kind of media (optical media with "incredible" storage capacity) but... now, this is only research!

Blu Ray is near and we can see it as a big DVD, we will use it with similar purposes. I think magnetic storage will not be replaced (yet), because magnetic storage is FAST on reading and writing. Do yo imagine your OS running from a DVD? Even your pagefile being read and written to an optical storage medium? It wolud be extremely slow so, there isn't a valid alternative to magnetic storage yet.

Anyway, it´s always good to hear good researching news!

[WhiteX]

The magnetic storage has a size limit, i´ll go look into it.

EDIT:http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/.../thompson.html

[davidpoiu]

Yes, it's cool, all my files in a disc, and with free space of 48000 GB!
It seems than the discs are gonna replace the hard disks in a future, when the disks be more faster.

[BlueFalcon7]

with the whole thing on protein storage, wouldnt it be more efficient that if there were 4 "intermediates" of the protein making a tetrinary system, and have each one represent a 2 bit system?

[Stezo2k]

heard this a few days ago, I dont think anything will become of it for a good few years. great news though thats a hell of a lot of storage

[Cyberman]

with the whole thing on protein storage, wouldnt it be more efficient that if there were 4 "intermediates" of the protein making a tetrinary system, and have each one represent a 2 bit system?

Perhaps space wise, however this done in current flash systems. Flash stores a charge in a poly silicon layer, this charge can be any state from ground to VCC. It's possible to use flash to store analog data as a voltage reference. However there are a few problems with this.
First you have to read the state as an analog voltage.
Second you have to buffer this and send it to a flash Analog to Digital convertor.
Third you have to write the state using a poly silicon transistor, this is a fixed current device that has to buffer your reference voltage. Acuracy counts in this case as you use more bits for the reference. This becomes much harder to maintain, especially when you are scaling down to quantum levels as the semi industry is now.

All of these are a bit more expensive hardware wise. CF and SD card media use this technique you will notice they aren't super fast either. The reason is writting the data is difficult as well.

The expense of making something FAST enough to read the data is the big problem. High density is high speed, no matter what. It will be difficult to handle. Your read heads may end up 'flying' over the surface at a whole 25mm per second reading data at that density at todays bus speeds.

Cyb

[bcrew1375]

Would the discs be dynamic?

[yegosimo]

wow... my entire music collection would probably fit there
i wonder how much will it cost...

[BlueFalcon7]

wow... my entire music collection would probably fit there
i wonder how much will it cost...

I was actually thinking of more along the lines of the iTunes music collection would fit on it...