Silk-Drive: Protein-Based Hard Drive using Near-Field Nano-Optics

We report a rewritable bio-drive using naturally regenerated silk proteins as the optical storage medium (termed as “silk-drive”) using a home-built tip-enhanced nearfield infrared optics system for both “write” & “read” information. The tip-based nanolithography can induce controlled topographical and phase change on the silk protein with a resolution of ~ 35 nm (i.e., storage capacity of ~ 500 GB in a 2.5 inch size). Repeated writing/erasing of the silk-drive has been achieved. Moreover, thanks to the fine biological compatibility of silk protein, the silk-drive can store biologically relevant information, which is hard to achieve otherwise by traditional storage mediums.