Imagine replacing thousands of LTO-9 tapes with just one cartridge. It's possible – if a Chinese research team's experimental DNA tape storage system reaches its theoretical maximum capacity.

Professor Xingyu Jiang from China's Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen and his research team published a paper in Science Advances on Thursday detailing how they built a cassette that holds good old-fashioned polyester-nylon composite tape and writes to it by depositing DNA.

DNA is a very dense storage medium and storage researchers have tried to use it for data storage, but without much success , because it’s hard to find info within DNA and read times are slow.

Jiang's team claims to have addressed that problem, establishing a sequence of data partitions on the tape and ide

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