Future Storage

FUTURE STORAGE

There are an array of futuristic data storage solutions that have been envisaged. These include:

•       Carbon nanoballs – where carbon cages with metallic compounds embedded in them have their structures manipulated on a supra-molecular scale to make them capable of storing and reading data.
•       Holographic storage – where data is stored in multiple layers, rather than on a single flat plane and encoded using thousands of miniscule holograms.
•       Bacterial storage – attaching data to the DNA of bacteria (up to 100 bits per organism) in order to preserve it.
•       Molecular memory – rather than like today’s semi-conductor chips, integrated circuits could be made using molecules to create tiny supercomputers with a million times more storage capacity.
•       DNA encoding – digitizing data and using a chemical process to store it within DNA, which has the potential to last for millions of years. Researchers envisage that just 1.5 milligrams of DNA could be used to store one petabyte (1,000 terabytes or I million gigabytes) of data.

With business storage requirements doubling every couple of years, there would seem to be no end in sight for the evolution of data storage. It may just be a matter of time before one or more of these concepts (or something not yet thought of) becomes the norm for storing our ever-increasing amounts of data.