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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?"
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!
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.
Actually the first "BioTech" would probably be something along the lines of the smallpox vaccines that were manufactured by injecting horses and then taking the serum from the blood for the antibodies.
In the harddrive case, it's a mechanical good. In the smallpox case, it's a medicine. Both are certainly ways to use biological means for manufacturing.
If someone can think of an earlier biotech, please feel free to let us know!
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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... :)
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.
On a similar vein, the first noted instance of BioWarfare being employed occured during the Middle Ages. Plague (Yersinia pestis) infected bodies were catapulted over the high walls of fortified strongholds. The hope was that the contagion would spread to the inhabitants.
-DD
p.s. I see a lot of biology misinformation on slashdot. I'd like to qualify my post by stating I am a fourth-year PhD student in Molecular Biology. Should anyone wish to correct or amplify my statement please have more expertise than having read "Hot Zone" or "The Coming Plague." Thank you.