Tech Article 3/20

The eternity drive: Why DNA could be the future of data storage 

• A storage company called Backblaze has been simultaneously running 25,000 hard drives to figure out how long the data will last in one's hard-drive or USB stick 
• The company concluded that some data may last longer than a decade, but other data may last just a little more than a year 
• Researchers at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, believe that a permanent solution to store data for millions of year may be DNA 
• In DNA storage terms, one gram of DNA would be capable of holding 455 exabytes, where one exabyte is equivalent to a billion gigabytes 
• Lecturer at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, Robert Grass, said the problem with DNA is that it degrades quickly 
• Because of this, Grass and his team are hoping to find ways of combining the possibility of the large storage density in DNA with the stability of the DNA found in fossils