Save us: The future of data storage explored

Holographic storage reared its head again this week. Saluting decades of research, US giant General Electric talked up its micro-holographic discs -- a revolutionary way to store vast amounts of digital information.

But holographic storage is just one of many ultra high-capacity storage media touted for future use by consumers. From multi-terabyte media as small as a fingernail, to formats relying on light-activated biological proteins, we're going to explore five of the most interesting technological promises.

Proteins are delightfully complex little molecules, linking up amino acids to their hearts' content, day in, day out. Go ahead, look in your diet -- you'll find some. Look into the future, and you might find your DVDs are coated in a layer of genetically modified light-activated proteins, capable of storing tens of terabytes of data.

It'll be the result of research by one Professor Venkatesan Renugopalakrishnan of Harvard Medical School in the US. He and his colleagues have modified the DNA of a protein called bacteriorhodopsin which, when exposed to light, naturally changes its molecular state for a few hours, before returning to normal.

Renugopalakrishnan ('Prof' to his mates, we imagine) thought these two possible states could represent digital information, which is also stored in two states -- zero and one.

By engineering the proteins to remain in an altered state for several years, he thinks discs packed with them can be used to store digital data. And enough proteins can fit on the face of a standard-size DVD that up to 50TB of information could be contained at any one time.

A prototype was built in Japan in 2006, but mainstream commercial use is still a long way off.

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