Genes to Replace Hard Drives in Ten Years? DNA Tapped as Next Storage Option For Massive Data

DNA is now the next frontier in data storage, with tech companies heavily investing on research. Science meets fiction as the race is on to find data storage that can last thousands of years.

Ars Technica reported on Microsoft's bid with biology start-up Twist Bioscience, researching the potential of genetic material for use in data storage. Microsoft is buying ten million DNA strands from Twist Bioscience as part of the deal.

DNA Storage For Massive Data

Conventional storage options are considered miniscule compared to the capacity of DNA, with one billion terabytes of data stored in just one gram of genetic material. Science has also established DNA's tenacity, with strands of a thousand years old successfully reconstructed upon discovery.

The Scientific American also reports a top memory manufacturer's interest in the venture. Micron Technology is investing in similar research in order to establish if nucleic-acid based systems have capacities way beyond that of electronic memory. The trend is expected to spark a wave of research that could render the technology feasible before 2020.

Conventional Data Storage Eventually Obsolete

The collective effort of humans is expected to produce at least 16 trillion gigabytes of data before 2017, requiring massive archive space. Current storage options are now considered bulky and impractical, hogging energy, space and maintenance, with a mere ten years maximum life span.

Production of storage systems are also backlogged in comparison to the data being produced. As data is added exponentially to the current archive, there's pressing demand for efficient alternatives.

Data Broken Down Into DNA Nucleotides

The process of storing data in DNA involves assigning the information into nucleotides (G, A, C, T); Twist Bioscience is commissioned to create ten million DNA strands with a specified sequence. The data is decoded with DNA sequencing.

Initial research on the technology was conducted in recent years. Researchers at Stanford University created rewritable DNA storage within living cells in 2012; Harvard researchers were also able to store 704 terabytes of data in a gram of DNA.

Engadget reports the technology is still unfeasible for commercial applications. The future of the tech is bright and promising, though. "[Progress in research] demonstrated that [the company] could encode and recover %100 of the digital data from synthetic DNA," according to Microsoft partner architect Doug Carmean.