DNA storage is finally within reach with the promise of being able to store billions of terabytes of data in a small volume, for hundreds of years and at minimal cost. In a tantalizing breakthrough, French company Biomemory has introduced credit card-sized storage devices that can each store one kilobyte of data on DNA.
For $1,000 you get two identical Biomemory cards; yes, they are very expensive – the first commercially available hard drive (IBM 350-1) sold for $34,500 for 3.75 MB – and slow; but this is mainly a proof of concept. The DNA on the card is dried; it must be rehydrated and read by a sequencing machine (Biomemory is working with a third party to make this happen).
DNA storage has been the realm of science (and a bit of fiction) for decades, but over the past two years there's been a flurry of announcements (from giants like Microsoft and Seagate to smaller players like Catalog of Biomemory) that make it a of the best. the most likely candidates to help quench the global thirst for data storage.
Storing bytes in DNA could pave the way for virtually unlimited data storage capacity at an extremely low acquisition cost, with market-leading operational costs (both for data storage and retrieval) and a shelf life that can be counted for decades.
Breaking the Petabyte Barrier
For now, we think there are some serious hurdles to overcome before DNA can find its way into food storage as a replacement for tape and then hard drives. Beyond the price, there's the speed at which data is stored and retrieved (currently in the low MB/s) and the still relatively unproven nature of the medium.
It's been almost a decade since Seagate told us the world would look like this will have almost no storage capacity left in 2016 (spoiler alert: it never happened) but generative AI and machine learning will likely help us get to that crucial point much faster than expected.
Biomemory aims to launch a 100 PB enterprise DNA card by 2026, which is just a few years away. It took hard drives about 60 years to grow in size by a factor of 1,000,000 to 4TB.
The French startup wants to break through this and achieve a growth factor of 100 trillion (that's one followed by 14 zeros) in less than 36 months. If they pull that off, it will be one of the greatest technological feats of all time and one of the hottest startups ever.