Hector Martin

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ 

Yes, that's what I was reminded of. I just re-ran the numbers with current microSD card densities.

I'm wondering now what the storage density of DNA is.

215 petabytes per gram, apparently https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage … Crap, someone let the swarm of the internet out again.

The concept of storing information in DNA is indeed very tempting. The calculation might be correct, however this assumes a single copy of the information. PCR is extremely sensitive but It would be risky to keep only one copy as DNA tend to degrade / hydrolyse

and even if sequencing cost decreased by order of magnitude (and continue to) is still to expensive for storage (and synthesis is also expensive) but it's still a promising field

The "single copy" issue is irrelevant. These are all order-of-magnitude estimates anyway. As long as your degradation rate isn't abysmal (e.g. >50% of your data goes away), the overhead of using an appropriate error detection and erasure coding scheme is well below error margins.

It's a very exciting topic and if you know about good papers treating about error correction for DNA storage I'll be interested to read them