No more need for computer hard drives??

[burythehatchet]

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

[roguevalley]

1. yea!

[burythehatchet]

2. It is kinda cool when you think about it

lotsa possibilities

[blue sky at night]

8. that is one handsome fellow........

you have over to the left!

[Swamp Rat]

3. Professor Renugopalakrishnan is a computer god!!!

:woohoo:

[readmoreoften]

4. Hate to get a scratch on that DVD /nt

[G2099]

5. Un-be-live-a-ble

Amazing technology just keeps on coming . . .

[skids]

6. Eventually HDs will fall out of favor...

...though I think the DVDs shown are neat, It's much more likely that a solid state solution will end up the preferred replacement, except for the case of vast amounts of multimedia data. Think giant thumb drives.

[Telly Savalas]

7. So when is somebody going to complain that this guy

is stealing a job from an American-born scientist?

[acmejack]

9. A computer memory virus will be the real thing soon.

[whistle]

10. It's alive, it's alive, oh god it's alive.....

[BlooInBloo]

11. Interesting development, but doesn't address the need for hard drives...

... not even in the SMALLEST degree.

The primary intrinsic advantage of hard drives, over cd/dvd is their speed - around an order of magnitude faster access/throughput than cd/dvd. I didn't see this addressed in the article, therefore I see no relevance to the obsolescence of hard drives.

It's still damn cool to get 50tb on a disk tho - no doubt about that.

[Ready4Change]

12. Hard drives are also re-writable.

This protein disk sounds like write once only.

Still, it sounds like a potential replacement for when DVDs start to seem too small.