Why DNA could be the future of data storage

Story highlights Science is now looking to nature to find the best way to store data in a way that will make it last for millennia Just one gram of DNA is theoretically capable of containing all the data of internet giants such as Google and Facebook Researchers in Zurich wanted to find ways to combine the storage capacity of DNA with the stability of the DNA found in fossils The Zurich team say their process could make the data encoded in DNA readable in 10,000 years' time or even longer

Already a storage company called Backblaze is running 25,000 hard drives simultaneously to get to the bottom of the question. As each hard drive coughs its last, the company replaces it and logs its lifespan.

While this census has only been running five years, the statistics show a 22% attrition rate over four years.

Some may last longer than a decade, the company says, others may last little more than a year; but the short answer is that storage devices don't last forever.

Science is now looking to nature, however, to find the best way to store data in a way that will make it last for millions of years.

Researchers at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, believe the answer may lie in the data storage system that exists in every living cell: DNA.

So compact and complex are its strands that just 1 gram of DNA is theoretically capable of containing all the data of internet giants such as Google and Facebook, with room to spare.

In data storage terms, that gram would be capable of holding 455 exabytes, where one exabyte is equivalent to a billion gigabytes.

Fossilization has been known to preserve DNA in strands long enough to gain an animal's entire genome -- the complete set of genes present in a cell or organism.

So far, scientists have extracted and sequenced the genome of a 110,000-year-old polar bear and more recently a 700,000-year-old horse.

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Why DNA could be the future of data storage