Genetic Future: How much data is a human genome? It depends how you store it.
Delicious Link
The question is pretty simple: in the not-too-distant future you and I will have had our entire genomes sequenced (except perhaps those of you in California) - so how much hard drive space will our genomes take up?
Andrew calculates that a genome will take up about two CDs worth of data, but that's only if it's stored in one possible format (a text file storing one copy of each and every DNA letter in your sequence). There are other ways you might want to keep your genome depending on what your purpose is.
The executive summary For those who don't want to read through the tedious details that follow, here's the take-home message: if you want to store the data in a raw format for later re-analysis, you're looking at between 2 and 30 terabytes (one terabyte = 1,000 gigabytes). A much more user-friendly format, though, would be as a file containing each and every DNA letter in your genome, which would take up around 1.5 gigabytes (small enough for three genomes to fit on a standard data
Original Link: http://www.genetic-future.com/2008/06/how-much-data-is-human-genome-it.html
