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I don't understand how this density could be so much better than something like flash drives. Aren't they also on the same scale of nanometers?
by tocomment 14y ago
I don't understand how this density could be so much better than something like flash drives. Aren't they also on the same scale of nanometers?
- colanderman 14y agoDNA is 3D. Flash drives are 2D.
- brodney 14y agoFlash drives also have all of the necessary equipment for it to be read. I wonder how much data per gram the actual storage part of the flash drive actually is. I doubt it's better than DNA, but I think it might be disingenuous for the article to be offering the analogy to hard drives without taking into account the extra read/write hardware.
- skosuri 14y agoagreed, it should be comparied to other arhival media like tape drives; but it's still pretty similar; we compare in our paper a hard drive platter rather than a drive itself. even then we are approximately ~million fold more dense
- brodney 14y agoThanks for the response. That is a truly impressive figure. Great accomplishment!
- InclinedPlane 14y agoState of the art flash drive feature density is 19nm, however an actual flash memory cell is larger than that. In contrast, a DNA base pair is about 2nm in diameter by about 3nm tall.
- sliverstorm 14y agoThey are both on the scale of nanometers, but DNA uses a couple molecules per bit. Transistors are not that small yet. 3D vs 2D is also a good point, made by another in this page.