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 demonstrated a process by which it’s possible to store 700TB of data in one gram of DNA.

At the moment, the stashing and unstashing process for DNA data isn’t exactly simple. Once you’ve translated your binary data into the right sequence of DNA base pairs (A and C for zeros, T and G for ones), you have to turn all of those sequences into DNA itself. Doing so involves standard laboratory techniques, but it takes a while: several days to convert 675 KB of text, pictures, and Javascript into 55,000 DNA strands. Reading it out again with a gene sequencer (another now-standard laboratory technique) takes even longer, and neither the read process nor the write process are particularly cheap, which is why you’d only really want to use DNA storage for archival purposes.

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