Iridia looks to DNA for archival storage solutions – Blocks and Files
Summary
Startup Iridia is combining semiconductor, enzymology, and microfluidic biochemical techniques with the aim of producing a read-write DNA microchip with archival storage capacity.The company reckons that DNA storage is essential due to the enormous and ever-growing amounts of data requiring archival, which incurs significant costs in terms of money and electricity. Individual elements have been proved to work and the bulk task now is integrating them on a single chip.A nanopore is an electro-resistant membrane or flow cell embedded with nano-sized holes and electrodes hooked up to sensors. Iridias patent talks about its new approach supporting DNA strands that are hundreds, thousands or millions of bases (bits) long. A nanopore reader can read up to 1 million bases per second.Iridia claims that 1 gram of DNA contains the same amount of data as 10 billion 6 TB disk drives, meaning 60 billion terabytes, 60 million petabytes, or 60,000 exabytes.CEO Murali Prahalad said in an interview that the product being developed by Iridia will have much lower read and write latency than tape, 2,500x lower power consumption than an SSD, and reduce exabyte-class datacenter costs by up to 99 percent if Iridias chip was used to store archive data. These are attractive numbers if accurate.He talked about Iridias chip having theoretically four orders of magnitude more capacity than tape or hard disk drives.