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Protein-Packed Hard Drives Promise High Capacity
Digimax writes "The New Scientist has an interesting article on a technology being developed by NanoMagnetics which involves using a protein responsible for storing iron in the body to store data on a hard drive. Is this the start of the BioTech revolution?"
Insert joke about protein-packed keyboards here...
Weren't they here first?
It seems to me that if hard drive capacities continue to grow at their current rate, in a few years they will have outstripped the porn industry's ability to fill them.
Pun unintentional...
Now we'll have a new excuse for crashes:
Sorry boss I don't have that document, my hard drive just mutated...
CowboyNeal's brain is a protein-packed harddrive.
Yea, this is all fine and dandy, but doesn't help with speed.
The real revolution waiting to happen is solid state hard drives that are affordable. Until we get rid of the moving parts, hard drives are going to be very very slow, relatively speaking. For the desktop, this is more important that storage space, since we already have 240gb drives that few can fill.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Use number 4,597 for Tofu!
Tofu: It's what's for dinner.
Ummm, no. Anarchists wear black.
Fascist pigs wear red, white and blue.
is it just me, or is there a LOT of different ways to make a high capacity hard drive these days.....
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
And here I thought that this was refuring to the 35 DF sets I have stuck on mu HD because the server is down.
"Aligning individual magnetic grains is a problem for all of us," agrees Mayes.
That quote struck me as funny. Like he's talking about world hunger or something. He's got a point, though...I do have a real problem getting individual magnetic grains lined up--in fact I can honestly say I've never successfully done it.
If I come up with something more insightful to say, I'll post it to this afternoon's dupe.
Hard Drives, now part of your daily balanced breakfast...
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
So in a few years I will be able to blame my forgetfulness on burning protein when I work out. So my woman can either have me fit, trim and forgetful or sporting a splendid beer belly and able to remember those 142 yearly special occasions/aniversaries every woman seems to have .... well maybe remember some of them anyway
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Yup, recombinant protein therapies and artificial livers were cute, but biotech hasn't yielded any _real_ products until someone started making larger capacity hard drives!
I was about to indignantly jump onto my molecular biologist high horse, and started laughing instead. Can't really criticize -- as far as I'm concerned, all that mysterious stuff physicists do seems impressive but it's nothing to me until I can stop worrying about downloading one SHN file too many.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Ahh, protein bars that are used for 'intelligent' purposes, instead of 'muscle heads' ;-)
And for those of you who think I'm slagging off people who go to the gym, I'm joking (plus I'm a gym regular myself).
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Ever heard of Mussolini's blackshirts?
And what about the Gestapo? Huh?
Oh, and Anarchists are just commies who can't grow armpit hair yet.
So will Slimjims because the new data sticks for these hard drives?
The article is silent on the question of how fast data can be read from the device - both in terms of bandwidth and latency. I would imagine that anything that's protein based would be awfully slow, and hence suitable only for long term data storage. But if it takes days just to fill the disk its probably useless. In any case, disk sizes have already gotten to the point where only a small fraction, perhaps 5% of users fill them to anywhere near their full capacity. So unless the internet becomes the primary medium of distribution of movies or something like that I don't see these kinds of devices having more than a niche market.
> Is this the start of the BioTech revolution?"
At least you will be able to eat the plates before giving the rest away to prevent revealing their secrets.
I'll paraphrase William Gibson
"Doesn't it seem weird to have these high-tech computers with little spinning discs inside them. It seems like a hold out of some Victorian technology - like a more modern record player."
Solid state has to be the way to go - no more waiting for your computer to "boot up", just turn it on and it's running your desktop, right where you left it last. Sure solid state SEEMS expensive now, but remember how much a 40 MEG hard drive cost 15 years ago? We just need to throw money at it and the price will drop. I mean come on chips are CHEAP - they're in everything
..........FULL STOP.
No
The human condition is to not accept the human condition.
In the future people won't read books, they will eat their hard drives. Information never tasted so good.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Now we are going to get spam for hard drive refills. Fortunately, it could be combined with those spams that claim to increase your ejaculation by 547%.
now even my hard drive is on the atkins diet.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
those muscular jocks can serve as data storage devices in the future?
Ummm, no. Fascist pigs wear red, white, and black.
This reminds me of an idea I came across once. Why not build a hardware gzip chip (Like the one on these PCI cards and embed it on the controller for the harddrive. While this may slow down speeds a little, we can get a lot more data on current drives. Even though this may be counter productive right now, later on with these SUPER fast disk drives we could really cram some data onto them :)
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
"Western Digital--nutritious and delicious!"
... to getting a computer virus.
"Is this the start of the BioTech revolution?"
No, that happened over a decade ago. But hey, who needs history?
New Scientisct article writen by somebody ignorant in material science: skips the important stuff and dwells on marginal. The company site more informative.
Magnetic particles in storage media must be evenly spaced and right size. This protein is used as a mold and spacer for making and placing the magnetic particles. The protein is spherical, has cavity which can be filled with magnetic stuff and forms crystal-ordered-like monolayer on support surface. Burning the protein leaves the magnetic particles in caramelized yuck. All this done in with external magnetic field. And since we are baking it well above Curie temperature of the magnetic material, cooling will produce the particles nicely magneticaly aligned.
[To organize apricot pits, place a baking tray covered with apricots in oven pre-heated to 475F for 2 hours, and do not stir.]
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
My hard drive is already filled with protein, but that has more to do with muzzle velocity than it does with any sort of research or experimentation.
pooptruck
I'm going to point out something that no one else seems to have noticed yet. This is an article in New Scientist, that should be enough said who ever actually read it. The have a real penchant for investigating off the wall oddball ideas then writing up the issue with just enough slant that one who reads it takes the same mentality as those who think cars which run on water have been made but are being held back by the big car manufacturers and oil companies. Virtually every issue of New Scientist has at least ONE grand convoluted conspiracy theory. I'm not saying there is no basis at all for this, just that New Scientist isn't exactly a reputable news source much less something approaching a peer-reviewed scientific journal. They are much more like Scientific American but don't even approach that level of credibility.
That said, go ahead and debate it all you want. I just think (as a molecular biologist...more DNA focused than applied protein mechanics like this, but still fairly well versed) that by the time all the "bugs" for this are worked out we'll have leapfrogged the whole idea of magnetic media Winchester syle drives. This is the equivalent to making a perfect artificial diamond point for a record player, by the time we had the tech to do it the world had already moved onto CDs or other media for the overwhelming majority of uses of said records...People still make record players, but they are a niche market to say the absolute least.
It sounds like these proteins come from either humans or animals. I'm surprised their source was not revealed in the article.
Looks like animal-friendly consumers will need to read the ingredients labels on hard drives, as well as motherboards?
Soon our PCs will be more nutritious than most junk food. I suppose that makes recycling them more efficient. Consume and flush!
You've seen the story by Terry Bisson, no sense repeating it here....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Add to this the fact that most data either is (a) speed critical or (b) does not compress well. i.e. database data you normally want very quickly, same for applications. The things that fill modern home computers are media files, which are already heavily compressed.
But even ignoring the desktop, big drives like this would be great, even if they are somewhat sluggish. If you can get the prices down to affordable levels, you can stick one of these things in a TiVo, ReplayTV, what have you, and keep all of your favorite movies, every season and every episode of your favorite TV shows, as well as all the big sports events, stored on one box using nearly lossless compression.
Personally I think that's pretty cool.
But I'll believe all of this when I see it. I'm just a layman, but I don't see anything that's convincing me that we're going to see a huge leap in hard drive technology any time soon.
Now I'm going to have to feed my computer every 8 hours to make sure it gets enough protien. I'll also will have to get a litterbox for when its done, too! Maintaining a pet is bad enough, but jeez....
Biotech is another hype industry that will go bust. Biological beings need a constant expanding of energy just to repair and upkeep their organic shape. A lot of complex organic compounds degrade without this constant repair work going on. So a real biotech harddrive will either be "alive," and have a mechanism to upkeep itself, replicating damaged parts, or it would not be true biotech, but a news on the level of "tiny magnets encapsulated in a polymer or organic binder" - so what? I wonder what the lifetime of such a device would be - personally I prefer inorganic storage devices, even if they themselves have short lifetimes: flash cards can only be written to for a few thousand times, CDR ink degrades in a decade or two(depends on light exposure), and harddrive magnetic media starts to forget after a decade. Now throw proteins into the coctail and see how long they last. I wonder.
Heat issues. neet to keep the hard disk temperature in check exactly. like our own internal body temperature, if we get too hot, proteins start to denature causing death, i believe this happens at 106 degrees farenheight or so. In terms of the HDD this would cause data loss.
We've had computers around for a while and have some of the smartest people working to make them even better using the latest and greatest technology, but why not just copy nature? Life has been on this planet for a billion or so years. Evolution has had much more time than us to make this run effiecient. Our bodies are far more effiecient than anything we can design even with the obviously "poor" . Things we have just barely now come to understand have been going on in nature for quite some time. Nature has also had a long time to weed out the crap. Despite that our macrodevelopment could be improved, on the molecular level living creatures on this planet are damned effiecient. If we take the effiecient molecules that nature has created and combine them with our much better designing skills (nature does some stupid shit.... like making the trachea and esophagus join at the pharynx which allows us to choke to death) we will get some kickass new technology. What will be a REAL technoevolution is when we figure out how neurons actually store memory. That will allow us to make hard drives, RAM, and processors a single unit which will be 1000x faster and have 1000x the storage capacity at minimum. Not to mention the fact that computers will then be able to learn (put some Actual Intelligence in those games) and the intefacing possiblities would be kickass.... I doubt that'll be in my lifetime, though, with the moral issues and whatnot. Sorry about the mindless rant, I'm a med student... :)
Our lab was doing research on protein HD's a long time ago in the air force. These guys are just taking the ground research to a production level.
Yup...it's the late Dr. Atkins' approach to data storage; proteins.
:-p
I wonder if protein shakes will increase storage capacity.
"Mom!! The Hard Drive Is Growing Mold Again!!!!"
... will come a new Generation of viruses
* Captain Janeway, I strongly suggest we insert the Nanovirus in the cubes central plexus.
The process is about how to organise and homogenise the arrangement of magnetic particles on the disc surface.
Reading and writing is still done the way it is today (mangentically) but, with a more regular magnetic matrix, greater storage densities can be acheived...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
"So will Slimjims because the new data sticks for these hard drives?"
The catch phrase you DON'T want to hear.
"Snap into a SlimJim".
..and how would viruses and bacteria effect this new media? Seems like you'd need a clean room to assemble these things at a level 4 facility threshold to keep them prisitine clean. And because drives need to be vented in some small fashion now, seems like it would be almost impossible. I have a hard enough tiome keeping BIG things out of my gear. Yesterday I dug out an old HP printer to see if I could get it to work on an old computer I have for a project to run away from my regular machine. WELL, seems mr mouse decided to move in, there's acorns and bits of fluff and other rodentia sign in there! I pick it up off the junk/backup pile, hear this rattling going on. I go WTF is this? Turn it over, clunk clunk, oak tree potential. Sheesh!
We keep working on newer faster computers, better and better AI, and we keep trying to find machines that are fault tolerant and self healing.
You watch, before it's over with all of our machines and computers are going to be genetically engineered creatures that are alive.
We'll have giant brains in vats, and giant beasts of burdon doing our labor. We'll grow our homes instead of building them, and we won't need highways because we'll fly around everywhere we go on giant birdlike creatures.
Everything will be organic save for some things that are still best served by mechanical means. Having said that, nearly all of our lives will involve some kind of biotechnology, except for food. All of our food will come out of some kind of machine.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Especially since it has absolutely NIL to do with the topic.
current:
fill hard drive with porn
rub hard drive a few times
protein comes out of hard drive
future:
fill hard drive with protein
rub hard drive a few times
porn comes out of hard drive
my blog
Years ago I added a whole 32 or 64MB of ram(I can't remember which) to my 660AV, and it was enough to do a couple of interesting things(ie, have enough left over to run applications 'n stuff :) One was load the ROM into RAM, which sped up things dramatically, since so much of MacOS was ROM-call based(remember the Toolbox?). Back in the day, that was a big deal; now's pretty common-place. The second thing was I could start up(and run) the system off a ramdisk, if I got the system folder small enough(that became easier as memory prices dropped etc.)
I booted my 660AV that way- timed it at 6 seconds flat, from when the bootloader started to when the system stopped loading the finder etc. That's faster than the time from when Lilo starts decompressing the kernel to when init gets launched on my 1.4ghz athlon.
Please help metamoderate.
Since it's a protein, isn't it going to break down at some point? Or will I have to start feeding my hard drives now?
-- This sig for rent.
You college roomate gets the munchies:
Dude, that was a hard drive??? You mean I ate all your porn! Way Cool!!!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It's sort of a holy grail for disks, magnetic, or optical, and even 3-d holographic media.
The disk could use a smaller head than is now used, of course, and also seems to call for a different PR equalization ideal, and different digital modulation/ECC overhead. I guess it could use a multitrack modulation code and a multitrack convolutional turbo code if bringing down head size is a problem. Since it's proteins, which may have many lengths or many bends, it may also have finer control of timing variation or it could also allow finely-graduated multilevel coding, which makes the coding and modulation rates lower in theory.
Just remember to scan your drive for mold or bacterial infections. Also, we off no warranties against rouge computer systems' misuse of bioengineering data, or if pets eat your drive platters. Platters can be used for a quick on the go snack for traveling businessmen. *FDA approval pending.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Oops. I meant the coding overhead is lower (so the coding rate would actually be higher in theory). The spin rate could be lower, too, even while the data rate goes up.
-Lucas
you know the rest.
Isn't "Protein-Packed Hard Drive" the title of a gay porn movie?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak