With Microsoft’s entry into the field, the use of DNA for data storage is an increasingly serious area of research. DNA is effectively a base-4 data medium, it’s extremely compact, and it contains its own copying mechanism.
DNA has actually been used to store data; in 2012 researchers at Harvard wrote a book into a DNA molecule and read it back. It’s still much more expensive than competing technologies, though; a recent estimate says it costs $12,000 to write a megabyte and $200 to read it back. The article didn’t specify the scale; surely the cost per megabyte would go down rapidly with the amount of data stored in one molecule.
Don’t expect a disk drive in a molecule. DNA isn’t a random-access medium. Rather, it would be used to archive a huge amount of information and later read it back in bulk. A wild idea would be to store information in a human ovum so it would be passed through generations, making it literal ancestral memory. Now there’s real Mad File Format Science for you!
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Mad File Format Science 
Data storage meets biotech
With Microsoft’s entry into the field, the use of DNA for data storage is an increasingly serious area of research. DNA is effectively a base-4 data medium, it’s extremely compact, and it contains its own copying mechanism.
Don’t expect a disk drive in a molecule. DNA isn’t a random-access medium. Rather, it would be used to archive a huge amount of information and later read it back in bulk. A wild idea would be to store information in a human ovum so it would be passed through generations, making it literal ancestral memory. Now there’s real Mad File Format Science for you!
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