Half a Million DVDs in Your DNA | Science/AAAS | News
Half a Million DVDs in Your #DNA: Nice writeup of Goldman et al paper, highlighting 3X density incr. to >2 PB / g DNA
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2013/01/half-million-dvds-your-dna
Very interesting discussion outside of science about the potential of storing large quantities of archival data on DNA. The statistic is that you can store a little more than 2 petabytes in a gram of DNA. This is actually cost effective relative to magnetic tape if one wants to do storage for >500 years. However one imagines that as the price of DNA sequencing and synthesis goes down this will become more favorable, perhaps being reasonable for archival storage in the ~50 year regimen. One of the issues with DNA storage, of course, is the lack of random access and the inability to rewrite over already stored media. But for long-term archival storage DNA is considerably more stable than the magnetic storage on tape or disk.
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2013/01/half-million-dvds-your-dna http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v494/n7435/full/nature11875.html