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Researchers demonstrated that DNA could store and perfectly return digital data at a density of 215 petabytes per gram. The result came from a 2017 laboratory experiment—not a purchasable storage device—and the demonstrated payload was about 2.14 million bytes. The study’s 215 PB/g figure is the result commonly rendered as 214 petabytes per gram in the original headline framing.
What the 214–215 petabytes-per-gram figure means
Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski reported perfect retrieval at a density of 215 petabytes per gram in their 2017 Science study, DNA Fountain enables a robust and efficient storage architecture. It is an experimental physical density achieved with a particular encoding, DNA synthesis and sequencing setup. It is not the capacity of a consumer product, nor a guarantee that a complete commercial system could store and retrieve that amount end to end.
For scale, the Wyss Institute’s 2019 summary equates one petabyte to one million gigabytes and describes the approach as reaching up to about 215 petabytes per gram. That is an illustrative density comparison, not a measured comparison with a particular hard drive or cloud service.
What the researchers actually stored and retrieved
The team encoded a collection of digital files totaling 2.14 × 106 bytes—about 2.14 megabytes—including a complete computer operating system, a movie and other files. They recovered the data perfectly from sequencing coverage equivalent to a single Illumina tile. The paper also tested a process that allowed 2.18 × 1015 retrievals from the original sample. These are results of the reported experiment, not performance guarantees for routine DNA storage.
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How DNA Fountain stores digital files
- Encode the bits. Software maps digital information into DNA sequences made from the four nucleotide bases.
- Add resilience. DNA Fountain uses a robust coding architecture that creates enough sequence information to help recover the original files despite lost or erroneous DNA strands.
- Synthesize and preserve the DNA. The encoded sequences are made as many short DNA molecules, or oligonucleotides, and held together as a pool.
- Read the pool back. Sequencing reads the molecules, and decoding software reconstructs the digital files from the resulting sequence data.
Columbia University’s summary of the study describes DNA Fountain as 60% more efficient than previous DNA-storage strategies and as approaching 90% of the theoretical maximum information per nucleotide. Those figures characterize the encoding method’s efficiency; they do not mean every nucleotide in a practical storage system becomes user data.
Why DNA has not replaced drives or tape
High density is only one part of a storage system. To compare DNA fairly with HDDs, SSDs, tape or cloud archives, readers would also need comparable figures for writing and reading speed, total synthesis and sequencing cost, random access, error handling, preservation life, retention energy and the maturity of the supporting hardware and software. The cited study and institutional summaries do not supply a current, like-for-like price or throughput comparison with commercial drives.
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The Wyss Institute’s 2019 report says DNA synthesis and sequencing remained much more expensive than conventional storage. It describes complementary work involving template-independent enzymatic synthesis, nanopore sequencing and error-correcting codecs. The report says the codec could recover information from DNA pools accommodating up to 30% synthesis and sequencing errors; that capability does not remove the underlying cost and workflow barriers.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Is the result real, or only theoretical?
The data storage and recovery were real laboratory demonstrations, while the 215 PB/g number expresses the density of the tested DNA storage approach. It should not be read as a ready-made archive with ordinary drive-like access. The experiment supports DNA as a possible high-density medium, but practical use depends on making and sequencing DNA economically and on building suitable storage and retrieval systems.
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