The following is an edited excerpt.
The Library of Congress contains 35 million books and documents. Its Web Capture team has claimed that “As of April 2011, the Library has collected about 235 terabytes of data,” and that it adds about five terabytes per month. That’s only half the number of bits stored in one single gram of DNA
Even the entire British Library—150 million items—can be archived in just two grams of DNA.
When magnetic tape was the basic storage medium, searches were time-consuming, because tape was slow and the data were stored linearly. Searching a tangled mess of DNA takes time, too. So we’ll need something really special to index and search our DNA memory.
Read the full article here: Storing And Sorting Big Data, In Messy DNA Memory
