DNA storage is pretty silly. The claim is 5.5petabits/mm^3 with a 100x redundancy. The problem is that massive storage is only as good as your ability to enco

DNA storage is pretty silly. The claim is 5.5petabits/mm^3 with a 100x redundancy. The problem is that massive storage is only as good as your ability to encode/decode into it. Let's be clear: this work encoded just 5.27 megabits. It's stored in what's basically a large molecular hash table where each piece of key-value data is replicated a million times for redundancy. Each piece then read 100x to correct for the -abundant- errors in each piece. So they encoded less than a megabyte. The problem with encoding information into DNA is that writing serial polymers accurately is difficult and slow. In this paper they're using an inkjet printed DNA array. It takes a day to make them, resulting in a bandwidth of: (5.27 Mbits) / (24x60x60 sec) = 66 bits/sec Reading is a little faster. The fastest system, the HiSeq 2500 reads 120Gbits raw in 27 hours. Factoring in the necessary 100x redundancy, one has a -maximum- read rate of: (120 Gbits / 100) / (27x60x60 sec) = 12 Kbits / sec So for 5.5 petabits it would take 16,000 years to write the data into a cubic mm but only 16 years to read it at the current rate. If we get a little scifi, and assume we build programmable polymerases and get nanopore (direct read) sequencing. Even then, physics limits you to something like 1000 read/writes per sec per pore/polymerase. Instrumenting to these will probably limit per-feature size to being larger than 100micron on a fabricated chip, giving us an ultimate read/write limit around: (2cm/100um)^2 x 1000 bit/sec = 40Mbit/sec for a giant 2cmx2cm chip. With the necessary error-correction and redundancy, it's probably going to cap out around 1Mbit/sec at best. Those 700TB take about 2months to read/write at these rates, and we'll have much-better solid state storage technologies by the time we figure out how to all that with DNA.