1 gram DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of dataf
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Topic: 1 gram DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of dataf
Posted By: semar
Subject: 1 gram DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of dataf
Date Posted: 24 November 2014 at 11:55am
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Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram
Looking forward, they foresee a world where biological storage would allow us to record anything and everything without reservation. Today, we wouldn�t dream of blanketing every square meter of Earth with cameras, and recording every moment for all eternity/human posterity � we simply don�t have the storage capacity. There is a reason that backed up data is usually only kept for a few weeks or months � it just isn�t feasible to have warehouses full of hard drives, which could fail at any time. If the entirety of human knowledge � every book, uttered word, and funny cat video � can be stored in a few hundred kilos of DNA, though� well, it might just be possible to record everything (hello, police state!) It�s also worth noting that it�s possible to store data in the DNA of living cells � though only for a short time. Storing data in your skin would be a fantastic way of transferring data securely� http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram - http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram ------------- Salam/Peace, Semar "We are people who do not eat until we are hungry and do not eat to our fill." (Prophet Muhammad PBUH) "1/3 of your stomach for food, 1/3 for water, 1/3 for air" |
Replies:
Posted By: Ron Webb
Date Posted: 24 November 2014 at 12:46pm
Very cool! Thanks for posting this, semar.  Unfortunately the ExtremeTech article gets it a bit wrong. They didn't actually store 5.5 petabits of data. They stored 5.27 megabits (Church's book), but they did it at an information density of 5.5 petabits per gram. They then replicated the book 70 billion times (which works out to 368 petabits by my calculation, but maybe I'm missing something). It may seem like a petty distinction, but it matters when considering the practicality of this technology as a storage medium. The tricky part is not so much the storage itself (we've known for a long time that DNA is great in theory for storing data). What we need is an efficient way of reading and writing the data. Unfortunately the article doesn't mention anything about read/write speeds. It does provide a link to the original http://hms.harvard.edu/news/writing-book-dna-8-16-12 - Harvard article , which refers to "commercial DNA microchips". I am assuming this means that the technology to encode information in DNA was already commercially available (and how cool is that!  ), so all they did was feed Church's book into an existing system. I wish they had said how long that took.As for reading the information back, did they even try? Neither article says so. ------------- Addeenul �Aql � Religion is intellect. |