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Comment by tehlike | Hacker News Reader

why not? what if it is programmed to replicate itself to provide redundancy?

Actually, you'd start with an erasure code (as the authors of these various papers typically do); the redundancy there is more effective than mirror replication. Copying is error-prone (10-6 - 10-9) and repair isn't that much better (10-9 - 10-12).

Mutations would occur, yeah? Mutant files, lol.

Every medium decays; if you don't estimate longevity and perform error correction/migration/etc. accordingly, you won't be immune to data loss, just blindsided by it.

People who do this use erasure codes.

Also, DNA kept in a dry, cold environment has an effectively infinite lifespan. Now, the interesting question becomes "what fraction of the the lifespan of the universe can I maintain my data with arbitrary accuracy?"

the biggest issue my non-geneticist mind sees with this is the issue of mutations.

No, the reasons are about business any need. What does this product provide that anybody needs right now? Storage providers are not limited storage device availability - storage production is driven by demand from the providers, and the producers will make more if demand goes up.

Next, existing technologies are more mature. They provide off-the-shelf products that integrate into a large ecosystem. So, DNA would have to provide some niche value that hard drives or flash drives don't.

Finally, with durable storage mechanisms, you don't really know how well they work until you deploy many instances of the mechanism for their lifetime; for DNA storage, that would be billions of cells (or more likely, passive storage containers) for decades or more.

So, I'll go with tapes, hard and flash drives and everybody else will too. MSFT made some claims about rolling out DNA_based storage in the decade-future, but they're blowing smoke.

Your reasoning is flawed (and frankly, phrased slightly annoyingly in your other comments, in a way where you omit your core arguments in what seems like baiting for replies). DNA storage provides durability [1] and information density (per weight) [2] beyond any current technology.

1: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/ab...

2: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/950

That's not higher density because nobody actually made something that stores a unique terabyte in DNA. The Science paper stored a megabyte. Ewan Birney's paper stored a concatenation of the same string over and over again.

Showing you can store a tiny amount of data and then claiming you have a density higher than hard drives isn't just poor marketing, it's outright lying.

To show durability, you need to actually test things for the planned lifespan, or use intelligent mechanisms to test in a shorter lifespan. Then you can claim durability.

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