REDMOND, WASHINGTON — Humanity is producing data at an exponential rate, prompting scientists to seek out storage systems that can keep up.
MIT Review reports that data is commonly archived using magnetic tape, which can hold as much as a terabyte per roll for up to 30 years. But conventional storage capabilities may not be sufficient for long.
Microsoft is now looking to DNA as a means to store digital data. DNA is more dense, and can hold a quintillion bytes of information in one cubic millimeter. It also has a half life of up to 500 years, according to the tech giant.
In its demonstration project in 2016, the company managed to encode 100 literary classics, or roughly 200 megabytes of data into DNA’s four bases.
But with the technology still in the early stages, converting digital bits into DNA code remains both slow and expensive.
Microsoft aims to have a DNA storage system in place for at least one application in three years. The ambitious end game, however, is for DNA to be the go-to for data archiving.
