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?"

-1, Redundant

[CraigoFL]

Insert joke about protein-packed keyboards here...

I'm downloading as fast as I can, Cap'n!

[coupland]

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...

Great

[Cipster]

Now we'll have a new excuse for crashes:
Sorry boss I don't have that document, my hard drive just mutated...

Funny quote from article

[1nv4d3r]

"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.

Yummy

[Your_Mom]

Hard Drives, now part of your daily balanced breakfast...

Heh

[Otter]

Is this the start of the BioTech revolution?

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.

Re:many choices

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer punch cards myself.

Sid Dabster is so cool.

Digesting information

[dfn5]

In the future people won't read books, they will eat their hard drives. Information never tasted so good.

great

[mattkime]

now even my hard drive is on the atkins diet.

I can see the tag line now...

[Captain Beefheart]

"Western Digital--nutritious and delicious!"

Read the label, Vegans.

[desertfish]

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 [slashdot.org]?

Mmmmm

[ZorMonkey]

Soon our PCs will be more nutritious than most junk food. I suppose that makes recycling them more efficient. Consume and flush!

Re:-1, Redundant

[Anonymous Coward]

Customer Service Rep: Sorry...we cannot access your account, our harddrive is suffering a hormonal imbalance.

Re:Vicorian era holdback

[Fweeky]

Will we one day look back with amusement on big power supplies, power hungry cpus and disks, and large volume cases with amusement?

The way things are going, we'll look back and laugh at the problems we thought *we* had, before trying to find the leak on our Liquid O2 cooling system to soak up the 10MW of heat coming from our desktops, while handling our Palmtops with oven gloves.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Thought I'd throw in a simpsons quote...

Lindsay: Yes. For example, no one was showing up for jury duty, so we made the experience more exciting by synergizing it with his comic book collection.

Moe: [reading] You have been chosen to join the Justice Squadron, 8 a.m. Monday at the Municipal Fortress of Vengeance. Oh, I am *so* there.

Wonderful

[Nintendork]

Now I'll have to worry about STDs when I mount a volume. Anyone know when the final release of Norton Virtual Condom is expected? How about an iCondom for the Mac users?

-Lucas