Microsoft Is Storing Data In 10 Million Strands of DNA

First I have to worry about corruption, and now I have to worry about mutation. Microsoft has partnered with the San Francisco-based biotech startup Twist to investigate DNA data storage. It's purchased the rights to ten million strings of DNA on which it will encode data, to assess the technique as a long-term, secure storage system. Microsoft simply hands over the data as a digital DNA sequence, then Twist creates it in physical form using synthetic biology techniques. Then it hands the DNA back to Microsoft to play around with. It's not clear how much data Microsoft is trying to store, but IEEE Spectrum points out that a single gram of the long-chain molecules can store a zettabyte of data—which is 1 million gigabytes.