Want To Store a Message in DNA? That'll Be $1,000

You probably keep a backup of important personal files, photos, and videos on a flash drive or external hard drive. In the not-too-distant future, you might store that data in DNA instead. French company Biomemory wants to bring personal DNA-based data storage to the public. From a report: Today, the company announced the availability of wallet-sized cards that store one kilobyte of text data each -- the equivalent of a short email -- using DNA as the storage medium. At $1,000 for two identical cards, the price isn't exactly comparable to a memory stick. At least not yet. Erfane Arwani, CEO of Biomemory, sees his firm's offering as an experiment of sorts. "We wanted to demonstrate that our process is ready to be shown to the world," he says.

[...] One major benefit of DNA is that it is a far denser storage medium than current electronics. The Wyss Institute at Harvard estimates that a single gram of DNA can hold around 36 million copies of the Avengers: Endgame movie. It's also stable over time and requires less energy than the solid state drives and hard disk drives used in today's data centers. Once information is encoded into DNA, it doesn't require energy use until it's retrieved using a DNA sequencer. Biomemory is promising a minimum lifespan of 150 years -- a lot longer than current digital data storage methods. Hard disk drives last about five years, while flash drives last for around 10 years.

Adblocker first

[Ferocitus]

or no deal.

Incredibly slow

[DrMrLordX]

It's too slow to be useful at this time. It's amusing as a proof-of-concept.

Re:Incredibly slow

[burtosis]

It's too slow to be useful at this time. It's amusing as a proof-of-concept.

Sir, this is slashdot, all forms of sharing information on DNA between people here is too slow to be useful and thus just amusing as a proof-of-concept.

36 million copies of the Avengers: Endgame

[rossdee]

I haven't seen that movie, but why would anyone want 36 million copies of it.

Anyway what is that in Library of Congresses?

Re:

[ffkom]

I haven't seen that movie, but why would anyone want 36 million copies of it.

Because "storing millions of copies of the same sequence of data" is what "DNA storage" excels in. DNA is much less suitable to store non-redundant data, where every little defect in a single molecule could damage the stored data beyond repair.

Therefore, people storing data that they do not want to store millions of copies of will probably keep using non-DNA media.

Re:

[jhutch2000]

Allow me to introduce you to a concept that already addresses this issue: ECC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[ffkom]

I am very familiar with error correction codes. But read up on how DNA sequencing works these days: It's not like there is a machine that untangles and then scans every single base-pair of all the DNA strands contained in a little bucket. Instead, DNA sequencing is _based_ on how easy it is to duplicate DNA molecules, and if you start that procedure with a million different DNA strands, then in every cycle some will be duplicated, and some will not. In the next cycle, the ones that were duplicated before ar

Re:

[GuB-42]

At $10000 per copy, it could be worth $360 billion in lawsuit money, according to Disney's lawyers.

Re:

[Jogar the Barbarian]

Anyway what is that in Library of Congresses?

No idea, but I'm more concerned about whether they're talking DVDs, Blu-rays, or UHD copies of the movie. Huge differences!

Re:

[Don'tJoin]

Right. The bigger issue is: STOP COMPARING SIZE TO COPIES OF MOVIES, it's a ******* useless metric, totally dependent on how much you compress it.

genome

[bugs2squash]

When are we going to discover that the "junk" DNA in our genome is, in fact, an EULA.

Re:

[Merk42]

We'll find out the "End User License Agreement" really is about Ending the User.

Re:

[bugs2squash]

or maybe a "this code not intended for production use" comment -- all bugs added by god

Re:

[burtosis]

We'll find out the "End User License Agreement" really is about Ending the User.

Yea, it’s an End User Living Agreement

Re: genome

[tchdab1]

And how long before I can store and play my flac collection on my own replica table DNA?

Not really

[PPH]

One major benefit of DNA is that it is a far denser storage medium than current electronics.

Not at 1K on a wallet sized card it's not.

The Wyss Institute at Harvard estimates that a single gram of DNA can hold around 36 million copies of the Avengers: Endgame movie.

That's great for redundancy. But with the most robust error checking protocols, all I need is around 2x the message size. How few unique copies of the DNA will I need to recover the data accurately?

It's also stable over time and requires less energy than the solid state drives and hard disk drives used in today's data centers.

Compare it to an SD card, which I can stuff in my wallet for years and which uses no energy while there. And the energy needed to re-sequence the DNA vs read SD card data. And how will that DNA do at high temperatures? Compared to solid state memory which (when insulated)

Re:

[Shaitan]

It won't matter in 150 years. We may have working electronics from 150 years ago but that won't be true of the folks 150 years from now. The tech we build today is far more sensitive, fast, and high precision but nowhere near as robust. Nobody is going to be able read that SD card and it is unlikely anyone will remember how to decode the data on the DNA either.

Your information has been eaten by an amoeba

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

We're so sorry.

i know what i;m spending my tax refund on...

[inerlogic]

"help! help! i'm trapped in this DNA!"

Naming of this new storage medium

[TrumpShaker]

For this new storage medium, before it gets -out of hand- with competing products, I suggest a name: JOAC (Jizz on a Card) or when it inevitably gets a reduced physical footprint: JOAS (Jizz on a Stick).

If I understand correctly

[Baron_Yam]

"Give us money and we promise we will store a small amount of information on a card-like device that will last 150 years... So sorry, but you have no practical way to confirm any of that".

I'm going to pass.

Pessimistic Estimate

[Ormy]

Hard drives last 5 years and solid state storage lasts 10? Since when? It may be prudent to replace them for mission critical usage at that time but they usually last much longer. I have [insert anecdote about long-lived drives] and I'm sure many others have similar experiences. And remember the plural of anecdote is data.

Re:

[Shaitan]

"Hard drives last 5 years and solid state storage lasts 10? Since when?"

Nope, that's the average and typical drive doesn't last that long. At least in operation. How long a properly sealed drive will last on a shelf I couldn't say.

Re:

[Ormy]

Depends what you mean by "in operation". I've had many drives powered on for 10-15 years and they still working fine. If you mean 5 years of transferring data, saturating the read/write speed of the drive for the whole time than perhaps I can believe the figures.

Storage time

[GuB-42]

Biomemory is promising a minimum lifespan of 150 years -- a lot longer than current digital data storage methods. Hard disk drives last about five years, while flash drives last for around 10 years.

I have 20 year old hard drives that are still readable. I think they will last much longer than that in cold storage, 5 years of continuous use sounds about right though. For Flash, I've seen the 10 years quote (cold storage), but I'm sure it is conservative. I think I have an 20 year old Memory Stick somewhere, I should try that. But these are running storage, not for archival.
For that, you have optical disks. archival grade CD-Rs claim 100 years, M-Disc claim a 1000 year lifespan. And I don't know how lon

Re:

[Baron_Yam]

You can get quartz archival DVDs now that (barring volcanoes, meteors, or a well-placed blow from a hammer) should last as long as the planet.

At some point you have to worry that your data will outlast the ability to read it. Anything short of human-readable unencrypted plain language accompanied by a dictionary and language primer is probably best considered lost after a century, when it should be assumed that the standards required to decode your media no longer exist. After that, language drift starts

Re:

[Shaitan]

"I have 20 year old hard drives that are still readable. I think they will last much longer than that in cold storage, 5 years of continuous use sounds about right though"

Most drives fail in continuous operation (not necessarily continuous use) within a couple years which brings the oddball long lived drive down in the overall avg. Next to fans they HDD are the most commonly failing component in the system. In cold storage I have no idea how long they'd last, except for the helium drives, probably quite som

Stupid measurement tricks

[gavron]

36 copies of the Avengers movie. In what, MPEG2? H264. Xvid? H265?
What about "copies of the Encyclopedia Brittanica" https://www.reddit.com/r/theyd... [reddit.com]

What about how many pictures of my butt can you store? Think carefully because JPG, PNG, GIF (pronounced with a hard G) and resolution matter.

This is all stupid and worthless.

BUT JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU ARE READY TO PAY $1,000 TO STORE YOUR DATA IN DNA
wait until you find out the cost of retrieving that data. It's priceless.

Reading and writing data

[Tony Isaac]

So you just plug this card into a USB slot and get the data? No? You have to take it to a special DNA lab? That makes it kind of impractical for actual storage.

Dense storage?

[Tony Isaac]

A wallet-sized card to store 1K? That's not very dense, when a micro-SD can hold many GB of data. AND as an added benefit, you can read and write the data yourself, on a Micro-SD.

Re:

[ffkom]

Ever since DNA-as-storage has been first advertised, they gaslight the public with huge storage sizes that are calculated by just multiplying the small, mundane information pieces they can actually store and retrieve by the enormous number of DNA copies that are easy to make. It's like selling a stamp with a few lines of custom-text, and boasting to the customer how many millions of lines that stamp "contains" (if only stamped down often enough).

storage medium

[laktech]

why would you use hard drives and flash storage to compare against for storage longevity? basic google searches suggest, LTO is last 15-30 years and, Optical media, 50-100 years

I just want one that says...

[kemosabi]

"You are in a maze of twisty long chain molecules, all alike."

That's a pretty duplicitous product pitch.

[slashdot_commentator]

Hard disk drives last about five years, while flash drives last for around 10 years.

If hard drives are stored inert, in environmentally temperate conditions, away from electromagnetic sources and shielded, the data on a hard drive can last a hell of a lot longer than 5 years. I'm not quite as familiar with the longevity of SATA flash drives, but they don't degrade like a consumer write once optical disc. The data can probably last for decades. The real issue is being able to have accessible, working hardware that can be attached and interfaced to the storage devices. It will probably

Re:

[adrn01]

I read that decades ago, Apple, figuring that someday someone might need the data on a 5-1/4" floppy disk, so they archived a couple of entire Apple IIe systems -- computer, monitor, and drives. Barring some system like one I read about years ago that microscopically engraves text onto a small silicon tablet, that is likely what would be needed for archiving data long-term, where the term is much more than 20 yrs or so.

Screw you, HP!

[Technical Guru]

One of the many reasons why we no longer buy anything from HP!

I read the DNA

[PPH]

All it said was "LeeLoo".