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?"

many choices

[ciroknight]

is it just me, or is there a LOT of different ways to make a high capacity hard drive these days.....

Vicorian era holdback

[spineboy]

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

Re:solid state

[dupper]

240gb drives that few can fill

I've had to delete more than most people have ever had.

Re:solid state

[mlush]

The real revolution waiting to happen is solid state hard drives that are affordable.

Solid state hard drives are already affordable. (as a price point on flash RAM USB key drives are about 1$/Mb). Say a 128Mb of Flash RAM cache on a 20Gb hard disk could provide instant access to frequently used files and come to think of it, would be able to defragment itself. I guess would not cost more than $200 (?)

Does such a product exist? and if not <Bangs table> Why not??

My Mac could(and can) do this

[SuperBanana]

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.

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.