Seagate has just announced that it will launch its very own 1-terabyte Barracuda harddisk drive sometime during the first half of 2007.

“Seagate’s 1TB hard drive will be our second generation 3.5-inch hard drive to feature capacity-boosting perpendicular recording technology, and it will use fewer heads and discs than similar-capacity products we expect to see from our competitors. It is clear that fewer heads and discs, along with our proven perpendicular technology, can increase drive reliability, and also reduce operating temperatures, power consumption, noise, and weight.”

Not wanting to lose out, Hitachi has also announced that it will be coming out with its 1TB drives within the first six months of 2007.

But, Hitachi’s will supposedly run on five platters, whereas Seagate’s will supposedly run on less, making the Seagate better in performance and more reliable.

Prof. Renugopalakrishnan and his team at Harvard Medical School in Boston have discovered a unique protein that could possibly be used to store up to 50,000-gigabytes (50-terabytes) of data onto medium the size of our DVDs.

Well, I’ve covered ferroelectricity technology that promises more than a thousand times greater storage space than this. But both technologies are just as out-of-reach right now.

The light-activated protein is found in the membrane of a salt marsh microbe Halobacterium salinarum and is also known as bacteriorhodopsin (bR). It captures and stores sunlight to convert it to chemical energy. When light shines on bR, it is converted to a series of intermediate molecules each with a unique shape and colour before returning to its ‘ground state’.

As the intermediates only lasts for hours or days, the professor had to modify the DNA that produces this protein to extend it up to several years. Not quite enough I would say. After all, do you really want to re-backup that 50-terabytes every couple of years?

But ferroelectricity or proteins, we don’t really care. Just give us our next-gen uber-large storage technology before our storerooms are decked full of DVD/Blu-ray/HD-DVD backups. Blame it on BitTorrent.