Bioencryption Can Store Almost A Million Gigabytes Of Data

[Devilmaypoop]

http://io9.com/5699767/bioencryption...nside-bacteria

The possibilities of this biotechnology are truly amazing. A single gram of E. coli cells could hold up to 900,000 gigabytes (or 900 terabytes) of data, meaning these bacteria have almost 500 times the storage capacity of a top of the line commercial hard drive.

Indeed, my best hard drive is a 1.5 terabyte drive that weights just about exactly one kilogram. If I had that hard drive's weight in storage bacteria, I'd have 900 petabytes of storage space that could sit unobtrusively in the corner of my desk. Of course, we don't know yet the precise practical applications - it's quite possible this will remain strictly used for complex encryption work.

Me wants.

[GasMask]

It has begun.

[Simetrical]

This is marketing-speak. Of course you can store huge quantities of information in very small spaces. That's nothing new. You need to know how quickly and reliably the data can be written and read, how long the storage lasts, and how expensive it is. You need to do genome decoding to read the stuff out, and that's something that currently still requires specialized equipment (although maybe pretty cheap by now) and a lot of time (by computing standards: i.e., more than a second). And encoding it is probably even harder. The reason hard drives are so much bigger per gigabyte is because they're cheap and include a means of reliably getting data off the disk in milliseconds.

There are certainly existing schemes that "could hold up to" (notice extreme weasel words) 900 terabytes of data in a gram. E.g., Wikipedia mentions "electron quantum holography" getting 3 exabytes per square inch, where an exabyte is a million terabytes. (I don't actually know if that's more or less than 900 TB/g, admittedly.) But all of this is nowhere close to a practical system. Which is not to diss it – basic research is important and biological computers could be useful – but you should remember it will probably never amount to anything directly useful.

[29 days later]

This is the sort of technology we are going to have to look at for future increases in performance given that even Intel are teaming up with 3 other companies to work on 10nm, I just wonder how many more years it will be until we hit the wall with conventual die shrink and silicon.