Humanity’s desire to preserve information is evident in artifacts like the Dead Sea Scrolls and Egyptian Book of The Dead written over 3,000 years ago. While information density is low and only fragments of the original documents remain, they still provided incredible insights into ancient human civilizations.
Yet, nature invented a superior form of information storage long before mankind: Earth’s first, and most advanced, information storage medium is DNA. The durability and density of this biomolecule has allowed scientists to recover complete genomes of 1.2-million-year-old woolly mammoths, shedding light on the diet, evolution, and cold adaptation of these long extinct mammals.
What if we could harness DNA’s storage power for today’s data needs?
Below, we explore where traditional storage falls short and how DNA could close the gap.
What’s Wrong with Traditional Storage?
Traditional storage is high maintenance. Let us count the ways:
- Bulky: LTO-10 tape requires 100,000 in3 (the size of two full-size refrigerators) to store
~60PB (~12 million HD movies). - Fragile: Even with temperature and humidity controls, it decays in about a decade.
- Cumbersome: Copying and transporting for disaster recovery is slow and costly.
- Unsustainable: Regular media replacement is wasteful.
In short, traditional storage is unreliable. We need a new approach.
The New Way: DNA
Since DNA’s structure was discovered in 1953, scientists have recognized its potential as a storage medium. In 1959, Richard Feynman proposed its use for data storage. DNA is dense, durable, and stable at room temperature, ideal for preserving data. However, until recently, these benefits have remained theoretical. Now, thanks to innovations at Atlas DS, they can become a reality.
How Atlas DS Does It
At Atlas DS, we have built upon years of DNA storage research to make DNA-based archiving practical and scalable.
Data Writing
Our custom chip synthesizes (think of it as “writing”) DNA at an unprecedented speed and cost efficiency. The prototypes we use today produce data at GB scale, already well beyond industry norms, and our next-generation chip will boost that capacity to TB scale within a year.
Data Reading
In parallel, we’ve reduced DNA sequencing (think of it as “reading”) costs by exploiting storage DNA’s known, uniform format with error checking and correction. This enables faster, cheaper reads than any commercially available method.
These advances allow us to take advantage of the native qualities of DNA:
- Durability: Stored at room temperature in our hermetically sealed capsules, DNA can
last thousands of years. Multiple identical copies and regular quality checks ensure data
integrity. - Density: DNA is the densest way to store high volumes of data; 1,000 racks of tape
storage can be condensed to a single rack of our stored DNA. - Ease of Copying: Enzymes make fast, accurate and inexpensive copies of your DNA
for multiple, geographically distributed backups. - Sustainability: Compared to current alternatives, DNA has an order of magnitude lower
carbon footprint and circumvents the need for regular media replacement. - Always Readable: Because of DNAs dual use in medicine, we will always have the
ability to read DNA data.
DNA has been considered the perfect archiving medium for good reason. Now, thanks to
innovations at Atlas DS we are making the use of DNA for storage a reality.
Contact us today to preserve your information forever, not decades.