Don’t Worry . . . The Molecules Have My Data

While skimming through Wikipedia looking for a bit more info on Conway polyhedron notation (not as interesting as it sounds), I came across an article on molecular memory. Apparently nanotech, the future savior of humanity (according to an influential member of the nanotech community), is taking a break from making my pants stain-proof to bring us a super-speedy new type of memory. It probably goes without saying since we are talking nanotech, but this is also, potentially, a pretty compact memory option.

Now my nano-physics education stopped right after second grade, so I don’t really understand a great deal about the details of this idea. Apparently, the goal is to store bits of data on molecules only a few nanometers wide. Eventually, the hope is to have a byte per molecule, but for now it is more likely that a group of molecules would contain each byte. There were also some things about photochromism and capacitance which make for an interesting read, but are a dull in the retelling (especially from a blogger who’s topic already ranks pretty high on the bored o’ meter). Suffice it to say, should they pull this off we would be looking at memory that makes flash drives look like my 80 year old grandmother in an Olympic sprint event.

Most of the research going into this is attempting to create a replacement for RAM. This, of course, isn’t exactly our area of interest in the backup world. We tend to be more concerned with non-volatile memory (memory that doesn’t forget when turned off). But, don’t worry. A quick Google search for ” non-volatile molecular memories” brings up quite a few results, some with promising names like Harvard in their URLs.

This may not be the very next step in data storage, but its probably not that far off. With the demands for space growing as rapidly as they are and the concerns of storage capacity, speed and environmental impact growing with them, we should expect plenty of innovative thought in the area.  I, for one, will be waiting anxiously to ask a molecule for my missing files.