Chinese scientists want to build a ‘forever’ DNA tape with a 80 million DVDs storage capacity – but it will take forever to write at the current rate

• Chinese scientists design DNA tape that could store data for centuries
• Prototype demonstrated with 156KB lantern image but writing remains slow and costly
• Study suggests theoretical maximum capacity equals around 80 million DVDs per kilometer

Chinese scientists, led by Professor Xingyu Jiang from China’s Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, are proposing a DNA cassette tape that stores vast amounts of data in a compact format.

The aim is a durable, portable medium for archiving data that could potentially last for centuries.

In a paper published^[1] in Science Advances, the team proposes a polyester nylon tape patterned with barcodes that create 5.45×10^5 addressable partitions per 1000 meters. A reader for it could locate up to 1570 partitions per second.

Not exactly fast

Data would be written as strands of synthetic DNA deposited into each partition, and then sealed under a protective zeolitic imidazolate framework layer.

To read files, the chosen partition is soaked in sodium hydroxide and the solution sequenced. The coating could be removed and reapplied to refresh files, the researchers say.

A prototype drive manages addressing, recovery, removal, redeposition, and reencapsulation in a closed loop.

In a demonstration, the system stored 156.6KB and reconstructed a lantern image.

The full sequence of three recoveries and one redeposition took about 150 minutes.

The team says that batching certain steps uniformly on the partition could reduce that to about 47 minutes, but even so that’s not exactly speedy.

Actual measured loading equates to about 74.7GB per km today, the authors say.

Their extrapolation suggests a theoretical ceiling near 362PB per km, which is roughly the equivalent of 80 million DVDs.

Using the measured figure, a tape the length of an LTO-9 reel would hold roughly 77GB, far below LTO-9’s actual 18TB native capacity, but the theoretical ceiling would imply about 375PB for a similar length.

Write speeds remain the big problem as DNA synthesis is slow and costly, so filling even a fraction of a kilometer would take a very long time at current rates.

The tape’s partitions support deposit many and recover many operations, so files could be retrieved repeatedly, erased, and replaced.

That brings the device closer to a managed storage system than a one shot archive.

The protective layer hardens the medium against heat and enzymes and modeling from accelerated aging suggests around 345 years of retention at room temperature and much longer in colder environments.

The concept could act as a useful bridge between cold archiving and warm access.

Chemistry limits throughput today, but the scientists are confident that the mechanical format could work with future, faster DNA writing methods.

Via The Register^[2]

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