DNA Data Storage
We are living in a rapidly changing world, the technologies we are using right now didn’t even introduce a decade ago. The Internet is changing business, education, banking, transportation, and even human relationship. With this ever-changing and growing world of the Internet, we are producing a massive amount of data.
Today, we have more than 4 billion Internet users around the globe and these users produce 2.5 exabytes or 2.5*10¹⁸ bytes of data daily. At the beginning of 2020, we had 40 times more data(bytes) than the number of stars in the observable universe — 44 zettabytes or 44*10²¹ bytes.
With these rates, in 2025 we will be generating 463 exabytes of data daily which is roughly 185 times the data we are producing today.
To store, handle, and manipulate this amount of data we need data-centers. We already have more than 500 hyper-scale data-centers around the world and they occupy around 285 million square feet of area.
China has the biggest and largest data center in the world with an area of 6.3 million square feet roughly equivalent to 110 football fields. This data-center costs $3 billion for manufacturing and it consumes around 150 million watts of energy to operate. Manufacturing and operations of these data- centers are harmful to the pockets and for the environment.
We are using the same methods of data storage that were used a decade or two ago but to store the tremendous amount of data that we will be producing in the future, we need some other advanced forms of data storage rather than just some magnetic disks, flash drives, etc.
here comes the DNA data storage technology into play
DNA data storage has become a hot topic in the 21st-century because it can eliminate the need for big, expensive, and obsolete data storage centers. the DNA storing technology refers to the actions of encoding and decoding binary data to and from the synthesized DNA strands. Till now, the scientists have done the test on DNA as data storage but the first system was created by Microsoft supported researchers to translate digital information into genetic code and retrieve it automatically.
The DNA data centers can store a huge amount of data in just a few grams of DNA, 1 gram of DNA can store around 200 million Gigabytes.
The existing data storage devices are using an age-old technique that stores the data into its binary form that is 0 or 1 and it is called Binarisation, the digital files are converted into binary code and then get stored and vice-versa.
The DNA data storage technique works similarly to the binary coding but with some extra synthesis and sequencing. The DNA contains long chains of the nucleotides A, T, C, and G, the DNA works great as the storage material of life information and the data can be stored in the order of nucleotides letter. Data stored in DNA can be read (sequenced), written (synthesized), and copied easily.
While writing the data into DNA from the binary code we will be encoding the binary bits into Nucleobase code then synthesis them into DNA molecules. For reading the data from DNA we will first perform sequencing into Nucleobase code then decode it into binary code and finally into digital files.
The process is slower in comparison with other storage devices but sooner or later the genetically advanced algorithms will solve the issue. Although, the DNA data centers will be unquestionably small and incredibly stable. the only issue we are facing is the speed of reading and writing the data.
In the upcoming decade, the DNA data centers will be a possibility if everything goes as planned by the researchers, institutions, and corporations.
