Storage Devices: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow.
By: Ishan Choudhary
Tags: Information Technology, Database, Data, Data Science, Future Technology

Storage Devices: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow.

What the future of Data Storage Devices looks like?

I came across an article a few days ago that primarily focused on the new developments being made in the field of storage devices. Data is being generated at the rapid pace today and with that, the tools for storing large data is also being demanded. However, this seems like a race that will be lost if no further developments are made to the existing storage technology because the rate of increase on data generation will outweigh the rate of increase in storage capacities.

Credits: Stupid Friends, Pinterest

Have a look at the picture above. A 5 MB bulky storage occupying almost 4–5 rows of an airplane, costing a whooping $120,000 in 1956. A 5 MB storage device (that bulky). A high-definition image now days occupies more than 5 MB of space. On the right hand is a $60 chip-like looking device that can easily be placed on the tip of a thumb. And its capacity is 64 GB (almost 13000x more than the device on the left). This refers to the progress made in this field over the last few decades.

But such devices may not be able to suffice the demand of today or the growing demands of tomorrow. The right question to ask now is, what is the future of storage devices?

More often than not, most people do not realize the developments being made in the field of technology. A new technology comes, we find it little hard to adapt to it, we then finally adapt to it. After sometime, it becomes inseparable from us. But how often do we think about what goes into making this sophisticated piece of technology. Almost never! Some of us do not even know how a pen drive functions.

Nonetheless, the storage device tech is progressing fast and the developments are of unprecedented and revolutionary nature. One such development I would like to discuss in this article is DNA Data Storage. The name encompasses the technology in its true sense. DNA is a hereditary material in almost every organism that stores information as a code made up of 4 chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C ), and thymine (T). Data can be stored in the sequence of these letters. Are you connecting the dots now? DNA Storage is possibly going to become the new form of information technology.

DNA stores genetic information about our body but they are being developed by scientists to store non-genetic information as well. Instead of the traditional way of storing information in bits (that is using binary digits 0 and 1), DNA stores information in form of strings using 4 potential base units (ATCG). Let us further understand DNA storage through its advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages of DNA Storage

In very simple words, DNA stores information about our body. Not only that, DNA stores information for a long time. It has a half-life of over 500 years. If stored in cold conditions, DNA is capable of remaining intact for hundreds of thousands of years. It is very stable so much so that information has been retrieved from a fossil horse that lived more than 700,000 years ago. Most of our hard drives or pen drives gets corrupted or damaged within a few years and information stored can be easily lost at any point. DNA storage eliminates this problem of hardware storage due to its stability.

Comparison of Information Density

The most important aspect of DNA is its storage capacity. As can be seen from the above graph, a single gram of synthetic DNA can store up to 215 petabytes of data! At that density, all the world’s current storage needs for a year could be well met by a cube of DNA measuring about one meter on a side. Also, one unique feature of DNA is that it automatically creates copies of the data.

To retrieve the stored data back, the same sequencing machine are used that are used for analysis of genomic DNA in cells. The information is then converted back to binary digits for further usage. This process can destroy the DNA as it is read — but that’s where those backup copies come into play: There are many copies of each sequence. And if the backup copies get depleted, it is easy to make duplicate copies to refill the storage.

The above mentioned benefits does classify DNA storage into a paradigm-shifting technology. However, this sophisticated technology has its own set of disadvantages.

Disadvantages of DNA Storage

For new technologies, cost is always an issue and DNA storage is no exception. In 2012, researchers encoded 0.74 MB of data in DNA at a cost of $12,400 per MB. This means over $11.5 million per GB. This is very expensive considering the cost of storing data today using normal silicon-hardware technology is in cents per GB. However, this cost is decreasing and will further decrease in the future. In 2017, the price of encoding data to DNA had fallen to $3,500 per MB (almost 3.5x cheaper in 5 years). Also, the number of organizations involved in the development of this technology has more than doubled since 2010, reaching 411 as of 2016.

The second disadvantage of DNA storage is the speed of reading and writing data is fairly slow compared to other currently-used devices. This makes it not a go-to option where data is needed quickly. Instead it can be best used to store data as archives.

Conclusion

DNA technology is a technology to look forward to, given the advantages it possesses and problems it can solve. However, it has its own set of disadvantages, such as cost, handling issues, etc, that makes this technology available to only a very selected portion of the society at present. Nonetheless, improvements are bound to happen as investments up to $1 billion have been poured over the last decade in synthetic biology companies. The question is, will it be available to the general public and if so, when will it be available on an industrial scale?

For more information, check out this article: The Future of DNA Data Storage

Thank you for the read. I sincerely hope you found this article insightful and as always I am open to discussions and constructive feedback.

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