I’ve written extensively about how fragile our data storage technology is. So far, the most robust medium we’ve come up with are carvings in stone or clay tablets, which is why we can read a complaint about poor-quality copper written in 1750 BCE.

Everything else like paper, tape, hard drives, and optical discs have distressingly short lifespans. Add to this, we need more and more space as we start to generate petabytes of data every year, so storage density is another big problem. Luckily, some very smart people have been working on solutions for decades now, and three very promising options might see the light of day this century. Perhaps sooner than you think.

Microsoft’s Project Silica: Data etched into glass

The solution is clear

Microsoft’s Project Silica uses femtosecond pulse lasers to etch voxels (volumetric pixels) into fused quartz glass. These form microscopic nanostructures representing data, which can then be read optically.

Microsoft calls this “5D” storage, because data is stored using five different aspects of the nanostructure: X, Y, and Z coordinates, as well as the orientation and size of the nanostructure.

This is very much a read-only storage medium, but there’s plenty of data we want to store permanently and without alteration. According to Microsoft, the data stored in this glass can withstand extreme levels of heat, flooding, electromagnetic interference, and scratches on the outer surface do not destroy the data within. This effectively gives us thousands of years of cold storage.

Recent work by Project Silica has been published in the journal Nature, showing how much progress has been made. Manufacturing is now much simpler, data can be written in parallel to speed up the process, and reading the data now only requires one camera instead of three. Most interesting is that the process has moved from expensive fused silica to “ordinary borosilicate glass found in kitchen cookware.”

The writing and reading speeds involved here aren’t mind-blowing. We’re talking megabits and not gigabits per second, but the density is impressive. A piece of glass the size of a DVD would have about 7TB of storage space.

DNA storage: Your data as synthetic biology

Technically, you’re already using DNA storage

DNA is a complex molecule that evolved from simpler precursors and most life in the history of Earth uses it as a way to store blueprints for living organisms. If we took your DNA and implanted it in the right type of cell, then allowed it to gestate, the result would be a clone of you.

But, DNA doesn’t have to store genetic information. You can have the base pairs of DNA represent any information, and DNA has plenty of advantages as a storage medium. The big one is density. It’s the densest storage medium we know. A single gram of DNA can store 215 million gigabytes of data. Also known as 215 petabytes.

We’ve already built sophisticated technology to read DNA for medical and other scientific purposes, and the cost of reading DNA has gone down by orders of magnitude over the years, which is why you can have your genetic ancestry analyzed for so little money. Though perhaps you shouldn’t send your DNA to just anyone.

In 2019, Microsoft and the University of Washington demonstrated the first fully-automated DNA storage system, which is a crucial step if you want to scale DNA storage up to something useful.

DNA is also, surprisingly, quite durable. According to Microsoft’s DNA storage page, it has an expected half-life of 500 years. DNA can survive for thousands of years in a dead organism and perhaps far, far longer than that if stored deliberately with preservation in mind. The oldest DNA currently sequenced is 2.4 million years old.

In 2025, scientists in China published a paper detailing a cassette tape for DNA-based storage, with a 330ft (100m) plastic strip fused with DNA. Enough to store around 36,000 terabytes of data! Best of all, the DNA on the tape is encapsulated to protect it for the long term. So, who knows? Maybe cassette tapes will end up being the final format.

Holographic storage: Freezing light in 3D

Not the holograms from Star Trek, but I’ll take it

At first, the concept of holographic storage might seem similar to the idea of etching data into glass as with Project Silica, but it’s actually much more interesting than that.

With holographic storage, you can use lasers to embed pages of data in a crystal. Two lasers are used, one carrying the data and a reference beam. When the beams intersect, they store an interference pattern in the storage medium. If you want to retrieve that data, you simply have to shine the reference beam through the interference pattern, and use a camera to capture the reproduction of the data.

So far, so cool, but what really makes this exciting is that if you just change the beam angle by a tiny amount, you can store another interference pattern at the same volume, and another, and another…

This means you can absolutely pack the 3D volume of the crystal with data, and to retrieve it you just need to change the angle of the reference beam to match. So start at page one, and then increment the angles until you’ve read all the data.

The density here isn’t anywhere close to the other two technologies we looked at, but in the 2000s an HVD or Holographic Versatile Disc was proposed that would hold 4TB of data. Quite a bit more than the 100GB the largest Blu-ray discs do today. Sadly, there hasn’t been much in the news lately about holographic storage, but researchers are still working on it.

Brand

UGREEN

CPU

Intel 12th Gen N-Series

But, don’t get ready to throw away your storage devices yet! These systems will roll out in data centers and big businesses first, and if some form of this technology trickles down to our desktops, they’ll be read-only at first. Just like CDs were.