DNA strands

DNA storage has been talked about for years, but how close is it to becoming a reality?

Chris Szewczyk, Hardware Writer

Chris Szewczyk

(Image credit: Chris Szewczyk)

This week I’ve been testing a weird Asus RTX 4060 Ti: One with a built in SSD slot! I’ve also been gaming on a BenQ 240Hz Fast TN esport monitor. It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it.

We live in a world chock full of data. According to estimates from IDC, the total amount of storage worldwide is estimated to reach 16 zettabytes by next year. That’s 16 billion terabytes! And that’s just actual storage that doesn’t account for much much higher amounts of temporary, cached, or overwritten data. That could reach as high as 181 zettabytes. So yeah, more than a few 3.5-inch floppies.

Obviously, that means there’s a need for a lot of devices to store it all. Those devices are typically made up of hard drives, solid state drives, or even tape drives. Such solutions are becoming inefficient in terms of power usage, heat generation, and physical size, however, so a new solution is needed. And one of the more promising ones in the pipeline is not electronic, but biological. I’m talking about DNA based storage.

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