Bacterial DVD Holds 50TB

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.'"

Comments

Re:I read this in a science book

[detritus`]

Creating an RNA sequence is not that hard, nor transcribing it to DNA (heck, its just as easy to build the DNA sequence) The problem is building one that's useful, that where the protein folding problem comes in (See folding@home) becuase what the point of having DNA/RNA if the encoded protein is useless?

Vaporware

[loxosceles]

I remember reading about this compound or something very similar back in ~1995, in one of the popular science or computing magazines. It claimed there would be organic 3d memory cubes in 8 years.

Italics.....come on....

[Edge00]

For the love of Pete, its Halobacterium salinarum. Can we please use latin binomials properly.

Re:50 TB?

[evilviper]

I wonder why these numbers are so greatly exaggerated.

I wonder how you know these numbers are exaggerated.

Anyway, once we actually reach data storage of that magnitude on a disk, we'll have to face the problem of seek time and transfers.

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 on figuring out how to leave the world of milliseconds and approach the nanoseconds.

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!

[gumpish]

SARS is caused by a virus, not bacteria.

Only Problem Its Destructive Readout

[fedrive]

Must rewrite the data after reading it every time. sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow !

Re:I bet these will have the same problem as CD-RW

[arivanov]

Rhodopsin is a very interesting protein.

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

[D4C5CE]

Manufacturers have moved to inorganic materials only, e.g. silicon-copper alloys, which seem to offer much better stability than organic dyes, for the first generation of the new 30-50 GB disks at least.
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

Re:I bet these will have the same problem as CD-RW

[Phat_Tony]

All organic compounds don't inherently degrade faster than all inorganics. Some are very stable. In fact, there's only one writable digital media I know of that's been certified by The Library Of Congress and other similar associations as an archival storage medium, and it's a CD-R that uses organic phthalocyanine dye. It's made by MAM-A (used to be Mitsui). They used to have a web page up all about it, but I can't find it now, but there is some information provided by resellers, such as inkjetart.com

It's considered to be more time stable than hard drives, conventional mass-produced CD's and DVD's, flash-RAM, and others.