Scientists develop new storage technology capable of holding all world's information in just one room. On a single gram of DNA, the new encoding tech can store as much as 215 petabytes of data.

Revolutionary DNA Storage Tech

Last July, Microsoft had managed to store 200 MB on a single strand of DNA. However, this latest advance takes those efforts to a significant step further. According to Hot Hardware, researchers at the New York Genome Centre and Columbia University have managed to develop a new encoding technology using DNA storage.

On a single gram of DNA, the revolutionary tech provides the ability to store an impressive 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) of data. According to Columbia University computer scientist Yaniv Erlich, the research team has reached 85 percent of the theoretical maximum limit for DNA storage, being able to encode 1.6 bits per nucleotide.

According to Neowin, by utilizing new techniques, scientists were able to store an operating system, a movie and other data in DNA strands. They were also able to retrieve the information error-free. This advancement in the storage technology is crucial in an era when humans are producing new data at an enormous rate.

Pros And Cons To The New DNA Storage Tech

The new storage technology is still in its early stages and there are still some downsides to this emerging storage medium. Among them, the most important limitations are the speed and cost. It costs $7,000 to synthesize just 2 MB of data and to be able to read the data adds another $2,000 to the total.

In terms of data speeds, they are right now significantly slower compared to NVMe PCIe SSDs. For this reason, until the performance bottleneck can be broken, DNA storage might be used just for archival purposes. However, the extremely high reliability and the promise of millions of gigabytes of data storage are definite pluses. In addition, as long as it is kept in a dry and cool environment, DNA can survive for thousands of years.