What If Big Data Is Too Big? A Radical Solution May Be In DNA   - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: ErikTheNorwegian
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2013, 08:53:50 am
content: Big

author: dr.diesel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2013, 09:31:15 am
content: Quote from: ErikTheNorwegian on July 19, 2013, 08:53:50 amVery dense yes, but not forever. DNA has a known half life, around 500 years IIRC.

author: dr.diesel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2013, 09:46:18 am
content: Quote from: Pippy on July 19, 2013, 09:41:31 amOptical media is manufactured at the absolute lowest price point, they all suck and are never properly stored. I've been using spinning drives for years now as backups, swapping them out for newer every few.Nature is very clever but not perfect, we can learn from both sides for-sure.

author: ovnr
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2013, 10:20:37 am
content: Yes, DNA may have splendid information density, but retrieving the data is apain in the ass.Also, the article is horribly bad (surprise!). They've stored 700 TB? Maybe, if you count "replicating the same 10M basepair sequence over and over" as a valid way of doing it. Also, making it about books is hilarious. Assuming 500 kB/book (booksarecompressible you know - most epub books I've got around are around 500 kB, incl. cover image), the whole 70 million book archive would take astaggering... 33 TB. Oh lol. I've got room for 17 TB on my boxes (incl. RAID6 redundancy on most of it), and with today's disks you could store it in a single desktop computer (9 4TB drives). Not exactly difficult, at least compared to digitizing 70 million books...I'll just chalk this one down to "reporter hears about revolutionary new storage method, writes glowing article about it, nothing further happens, and the world moves on". Remember holographic disks (HVD)?

author: dr.diesel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2013, 10:31:39 am
content: Quote from: ErikTheNorwegian on July 19, 2013, 10:14:52 amTrue, but then you have to wrap it up in a living machine. Then since it's organic and living you have to add an immune system to fight off the endless supply to stuff trying to eat it. All of this ultra complexity for it to just replicate wrong 70 years down the road and get cancer.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2013, 10:55:48 am
content: AFAIK the "bit error rate" of DNA isextremely high, not so much an issue in living things where it's frequently rebuilt but for data storage and archival as the article suggests, I wouldn't trust its robustness. NAND flash is already bad enough...

author: dr.diesel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2013, 12:22:55 pm
content: Quote from: ErikTheNorwegian on July 19, 2013, 12:16:46 pmIf not kept living, then you're back to the half life problem. As stated this is a horrible data storage method, it will never be used outside of normal life.

author: dr.diesel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2013, 12:35:55 pm
content: Quote from: ErikTheNorwegian on July 19, 2013, 12:31:08 pmI can't argue with that my friend.However, life, DNA, etc is likely just too fragile, if you really need your message to last etch it in Bismuth-209, which has a half life of 4.6×10^19 years.