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Microsoft looks to manufacture DNA to store data

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The Microsoft Corporation has recently announced that it will begin research and development in an effort to create manufactured DNA to use as a storage facility. The company announced that it will be working on the project with a recent bio-tech startup company called Twist Bioscience.

Microsoft researchers have been working with a research team from the University o Washington and the two collaborators have published a paper stating that the standard storage capabilities that are currently being used are simply not capable of standing up to the current and future demand of storage. Disk based and optical media based storage systems are quickly becoming obsolete they declare.

According the the researchers, one cubic millimeter of manufactured DNA has the potential to store an exabyte of data on it. The researchers cite and example of taking all of the cold storage data now being held by Facebook and being able to store it, through the use of this synthetic DNA, on an area no larger than the head of a match.

Microsoft will buy ten million synthetic DNA molecules from Twist Bioscience so that research and development can soon begin to test the hypothesis that this manufactured DNA can be used for data storage. Other projections include that this new technology will be able to store data on the size and scale of zettabytes.

What the researchers are most excited about, it seems, in the durability of the DNA approach. Now, storage disks are good for about five years and tape will currently last about 30 years. The DNA proposal, however, declares that data stored on synthetic DNA will last for at least two thousand years.

Where the synthetic DNA approach fails over current traditional storage techniques is that it could take dozens of hours to retrieve data from one of these manufactured DNA molecule storage units. As of now, a tape takes but mere minutes to spit out its data.

Twist Bioscience is creating the manufactured DNA from silicon and they remain optimistic because of the longevity of the potential storage technology. Microsoft researchers state they are in the early stages of their research and development and the commercial prospects for the invention, if it works, are still several years away.

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