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I mean, that would make your storage medium a potential biohazard. Although it probably would all be cool until someone put smallpox.bin on a major torrent tracker.
If it’s really that good, we should come up with a variant using slightly different chemistry so that biocontamination is not a factor.
Am I alone in thinking that using regular DNA is a terrible idea for data storage? I mean, that would make your storage medium a potential biohazard. Although it probably would all be cool until someone put smallpox.bin on a major torrent tracker. If it’s really that good, we should come up with a variant using slightly different chemistry so that biocontamination is not a factor.
> DNA synthesis remains a bottleneck in the adoption of DNA as a data storage medium. Yes, one of many. Another one is a simple question: What exactly is the use case again? Because, storage isn't something we lack. Especially when talking about storage where, obviously, fast random access isn't a requirement, aka. data archiving. We have good solutions for that; an LTO-9 tape can hold 18TiB of data native and up to…
Some number I found online, while trying to multiply the 30 trillion human cells with the data storage of DNA per cell: "one gram of dried DNA can store 455 exabytes of data" Seems like a pretty sweet use case to me! I definitely do lack storage by the way. Say I want to download the common crawl data set, 380 TiB. And for redundancy I'd need multiple copies of the data too. That's a lot of disks for in the home. "18…
Yes, and half a gram of Hydrogen could produce ~500 Megawatts of power in a fusion reactor. However, that theoretical value will remain irrelevant, as long as we cannot build a practically useful fusion reactor. And even if we could build one, it still has to compete with all other forms of producing power for scalability, reliability, efficiency and cost.
The fact that there is a very high theoretical number that seems really impressive, isn't a use case.
So, with that being said: how long does it take to write these 455EiB? How long does it take to read them? How error prone are both processes? And how much does it cost to write/read them?
> "18TiB ought to be enough for everyone" really doensn't cut it.
Pretty sure I never said that.
Also pretty sure common crawl can be compressed. Even assuming only a 2:1 compression rate, that means it fits comfortably on 11 LTO-9's. Now, a quick google-search churned out tape prices of about 110-140 $ per LTO-9. Let's say ~150$ per tape, that means the whole thing fit's on 1650 $ worth of storage. About 5000 bucks with 2 backups included. Double that for uncompressed storage.
Alright, so how does that compare to DNA storage?
https://www.nanalyze.com/2023/03/dna-data-storage-solution/
quote:
These days, it costs $600 to sequence a complete genome which contains around 200 gigabytes of data or about $3 per gig. Today, magnetic tape technology offers the lowest purchase price of raw storage capacity at around two cents per gigabyte
end quote.
So just reading the 380 TiB back from uncompressed storage ONCE, would cost ~1,140,000 dollars.
And that's just for reading. At a price differential that is measured in multiple orders of magnitude, a technology better offer some REALLY good, REALLY tangible advantages to compete.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>using DNA as an information storage medium is a pretty neat concept And billions of years old.
> And billions of years old. With not quite good backup strategies.
Something that I always found fascinating is how DNA is a base 4 information format. There's this thing called radix economy, which is basically an expression of how efficient a number system is. Base e is the theoretical maximum, and so base 3 is the closest integer. Obviously if you have a special use case, then that may dominate your radix economy (like hex, b64, etc...), but for general purpose information purpos…
Might error-correction play a role? Having a lightly inefficient base 4 system might provide capacity for the surplus error correcting code information capacity?
Something that I always found fascinating is how DNA is a base 4 information format. There's this thing called radix economy, which is basically an expression of how efficient a number system is. Base e is the theoretical maximum, and so base 3 is the closest integer. Obviously if you have a special use case, then that may dominate your radix economy (like hex, b64, etc...), but for general purpose information purpos…
Might error-correction play a role? Having a lightly inefficient base 4 system might provide capacity for the surplus error correcting code information capacity?
Apart from repairing structural damage such as missing bonds, the cell can even repair missing bases or non-straight breaks without loss. This mechanism is also used for replication: the entire strand is split and each half is completed with its mirror counterpart.
Something that I always found fascinating is how DNA is a base 4 information format. There's this thing called radix economy, which is basically an expression of how efficient a number system is. Base e is the theoretical maximum, and so base 3 is the closest integer. Obviously if you have a special use case, then that may dominate your radix economy (like hex, b64, etc...), but for general purpose information purpos…
Some DNA is used to attract other proteins, or even interact with DNA elsewhere on the strand, or is translated to RNA (one-on-one) which can then have a function based on its sequence or the structure it folds into.
Any 'logic' there is, is built _on top_ of this.
Something that I always found fascinating is how DNA is a base 4 information format. There's this thing called radix economy, which is basically an expression of how efficient a number system is. Base e is the theoretical maximum, and so base 3 is the closest integer. Obviously if you have a special use case, then that may dominate your radix economy (like hex, b64, etc...), but for general purpose information purpos…
DNA is not really processed like that, afaik. Mostly, each 3 bases code for an amino acid, which are glued together to a string (protein), which folds in a 3D structure based on the characteristics of all amino acids. Some DNA is used to attract other proteins, or even interact with DNA elsewhere on the strand, or is translated to RNA (one-on-one) which can then have a function based on its sequence or the structure…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And billions of years old. With not quite good backup strategies.
If you create your data right, the actual data can make backups of itself. There's even builtin ways for it to improve itself over time using genetic algorithms.