Scientists successfully store 700TB of data in one gram of DNA
http://dvice.com/archives/2012/08/scientists-succ.php
Traditional platter-based hard drives and solid state flash drives might
dominate the storage landscape today, but in the future, you'll be
storing more data than you could possibly sift through within your very
own DNA.
George Church and Sri Kosuri, two Harvard Wyss Institute scientists have
successfully managed to store 700TB of data in one gram of DNA.
ExtremeTech's Sebastian Anthony breaks it down like so:
Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard
drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with
each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and
C = 0).
To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it - just as if
you were sequencing the human genome - and convert each of the TGAC
bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a
19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) - so
a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into
usable data using the addresses.
In addition to the obvious size advantages that would allow you to store
a virtually unlimited amount of documents, photos, videos, music, etc.,
stashing data in DNA is great because it's stable at room temperature,
meaning it doesn't require complicated cooling solutions to keep the
data safe, which in turn improves its longevity.
What that means is your secret collection of smutty videos will still be
accessible hundreds of thousands of years after you're dead.
As for the disadvantages, Church says that reading and writing data in
DNA is "slower than in other media, however, which makes it better
suited for archival storage of massive amounts of data, rather than for
quick retrieval or data processing."
While the breakthrough is an utter success, like all advancements, it
could be a while before the technology trickles down to consumer
applications.
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