This Molecular ‘Hard Drive’ Stores Information in Plastic
1 min read
Summary
The exponential growth of data is leading to a global storage crisis, with traditional hard drives nearing their limits in terms of scalability, cost and sustainability.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have experimented with synthetic ‘letters’ in a bid to expand the limits of data storage.
The team developed four custom-made molecules that could be assembled into a 256-letter ‘alphabet’, which is both affordable and small enough to be integrated into consumer electronics, overcoming the problems associated with existing data carriers.
In testing, they accurately encoded and decoded a 11-character computer password into a molecular chain, proving the concept.
The molecular storage device is still a work in progress and is currently too slow for commercial applications, but the team is working on alternative systems that could speed up the decoding process.
