Long have people discussed the prospect and debated the question of what we really are. Well, at the very basics of it, we are all just data stored on tiny little hard drives, in a way, right? Some people may not agree, but Microsoft certainly has realized this very detail. Welcome back to #TechTuesday.
Nothing More Than Zeroes and Ones
With the rapidly growing demand for more suitable data storage, especially in your common business setting, there are only so many ways to keep your data. With the growing demand for better, safer methods, we have looked into resources such as cloud based storage, flash drives, solid state technology, and plenty more. But while these methods may be good for now, they all share a very similar issue; they are small and finite.
The fact is, we do not have a very stable medium with which we can store mass amounts of data while still maintaining a cost effective standard. The physical device is always the limitation, and while we have made some great advancements in drives storing more than a few Terabytes for mere hundreds of dollars, it just does not satisfy demand.
Its In Our Genes
Twist Bioscience is a San Francisco-based biology startup focused on accelerating science and innovation through rapid, high-quality DNA synthesis. They achieve this with their own proprietary method of DNA manufacturing that essentially produces synthetic bits of our biology, such as genes and oligonucleotide pools. They’re up to some pretty cool things over in Frisco, and Microsoft recognized just that, as they just purchased ten million strands of synthetic DNA from this startup.
Why bother, you may ask? Well, scientists have succeeded in the past with storing MP3 files on base pairs of DNA, holding incredible amounts in microscopic sized “units” of storage. So, why not take this experiment and turn in large scale? Microsoft’s Research and Development team calculates that you could store as much as 1,000,000,000 (one billion) Terabytes in a single gram of synthetic DNA. To put that in perspective, your typical corporate grade storage servers use 10TB drives in a RAID array ranging from 3 to 27 drives per rack mounted device.
These setups often cost several tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up, while also requiring a dedicated room and heavy maintenance to upkeep. A single gram of this synthetic DNA could entirely remove that necessity for the data center. It could revolutionize cloud storage, allowing providers to offer larger capacity storage for free, and even the subscribers an option for much grander scale access.
While this technology might not be something we will see tomorrow, Microsoft is eager to see this developed. Such an advancement would mean that our data now has a near infinite shelf life, so long as the cost can be downsized to a consumer grade.
