Establishing Endurance and Data Retention Metrics in a DNA Data Storage System

Users of DNA as a digital data storage medium must have confidence that they can reliably recover their stored data, and to understand the competing capabilities and claims of codecs, readers, writers, and container systems as a multi-vendor DNA data storage ecosystem emerges. To facilitate this, the DNA Data Storage Alliance is working to create standard methods and metrics to enable the objective verification of endurance and data retention claims for DNA-based storage media container systems, and to more generally standardize how DNA-based data reliability and endurance is characterized. This talk will review work on two specifications being developed: 1) a standard methodology for rating the expected half-life/shelf life of different DNA perseveration/storage mechanisms, from stainless steel sealed capsules filled with inert gas, to filter paper, such that objective comparisons can be made and verified; and 2) defining standard, “FDA-like”, labeling for DNA-media such that the recipient/owner of the media can select an optimal sequencing solution based on the knowledge of how the media was created and stored.