14,000 Blu-rays. In a gram of DNA.

[JamesNZ]

Not half-bad

http://gizmodo.com/5935929/researche...ne-gram-of-dna

[solo2101]

who is up for BIODISKS?

[rclark]

Does show the 'potential' for data storage.... Long way from being practical. Because of it's nature, I'd think you would have to build some 'auto-correction' (RAID type technology) into the mix, so the DNA would fix itself when found in error. Wonder how heat/cold would affect it as it would have to be stable over a large temperature range to be practical. Interesting none the less.

Back to planet Earth, speaking of being practical, it sure would be nice to read/write data on blu-ray technology from Linux.... And play distributed multimedia....

[jpollard]

Might cause a different result if it goes viral....

Especially if the original was Jurassic Park

[Gareth Jones]

That's all right. Data loss? Just splice in some frog...

[jpollard]

Originally Posted by rclark

Does show the 'potential' for data storage.... Long way from being practical. Because of it's nature, I'd think you would have to build some 'auto-correction' (RAID type technology) into the mix, so the DNA would fix itself when found in error. Wonder how heat/cold would affect it as it would have to be stable over a large temperature range to be practical. Interesting none the less.

DNA already has raid 2 in compliment form, also has some support for redundancy and error correction.

Heat and cold doesn't bother it that much (well, under 100C works OK, but can go up to about 300C if under pressure.

Cold storage of DNA is known to last years, dry storage has been known to last about 3000 (wheat... and still viable).

The problem is that read rates are HORRIBLY slow.

[angryfirelord]

Originally Posted by rclark

Does show the 'potential' for data storage.... Long way from being practical. Because of it's nature, I'd think you would have to build some 'auto-correction' (RAID type technology) into the mix, so the DNA would fix itself when found in error. Wonder how heat/cold would affect it as it would have to be stable over a large temperature range to be practical. Interesting none the less.

Back to planet Earth, speaking of being practical, it sure would be nice to read/write data on blu-ray technology from Linux.... And play distributed multimedia....

I don't think storage is the problem. After all, DNA has been around since life began. What is the problem is the ability to read/write to it. With electricity, it's easy since on is a 1 and off is a 0. With chemical sequencing, I'd imagine it's a bit more difficult.

[marriedto51]

Don't we already know that DNA is the storage medium for a huge computing project? Read Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy ...

[stevea]

No RAID2, no hamming or ECC. A cursory look at the codon table shows plenty of opportunity for uncorrectable single base error.

dry storage has been known to last about 3000 (wheat... and still viable).

Urban legend that.

[jpollard]

So I'm off by 1000 years...

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/32.../1464.abstract

but not urban legend.

And the operation is in triples, not singles. And there is error recovery - mirroring. Each chromosome is duplicated from different sources to produce the same result. In addition each DNA strand maintains a compliment mirror.

Redundancy exists in that a single base error is repaired during replication. As long as the damage rate doesn't exceed the repair capability, nothing happens.

[JamesNZ]

Originally Posted by jpollard

Might cause a different result if it goes viral....

Especially if the original was Jurassic Park

Now that would be something