In late 2024 we did a piece on developments in optical digital storage and expectations for the following year. This piece continues this, looking at developments with the many optical storage startups as well as two DNA storage startup focusing on providing new options for digital archiving and data preservation.
As stated in the 2024 article, data centers often use a combination of different digital storage technologies to optimize performance requirements and the costs of storing information. This leads to the use of various types of digital storage technology trading off cost versus performance. The chart below, from my colleague, Jim Handy, of Objective Analysis shows a log-log plot of storage performance versus capacity price for various memory and digital storage technologies.
In archival storage, data is kept that still has potential value but which is very seldom accessed, for instance for various types of legal compliance or for historical value. This layer generally requires lower costs for storage than warmer storage layers and this is the realm where magnetic tape and optical disc storage have their greatest use and where new archival storage startups could find a home, especially with the expected growth in archived data, including raw data, to support AI training and inference.
In August 2025 John Monroe and Brad Jones, long time storage industry market researchers wrote a white paper projecting enormous active archive digital storage. In their projections out to 2050 they project significant growth in digital storage shipments with some emerging technology dominating shipping storage capacity by that time, as shown in the figure below. For comparison I note that Coughlin Associates projections are for about 8.3ZB (8,300 EB) of shipping storage capacity in 2030, up from about 2.5ZB of shipped digital storage in 2025.
As this white paper points out, the vast majority of stored data is archived data. This then will drive demand for storage technologies to support this archival data growth. Magnetic tape and hard disk drives continue to grow in storage capacity and lower storage costs but as secondary and archive storage demand grows, there may be opportunities for new storage media to play a role, particularly if they can provide higher performance, lower cost, including ongoing energy costs, and greater longevity than current archive storage media. Depending upon developments, extensions of current or new storage technologies could dominate in the future.
Optical storage libraries are being sold as an alternative to magnetic tape storage and with the technologies being introduced by numerous startup optical storage startups, this use could increase. Coughlin Associates wrote a white paper on current archive storage technologies, including these newer optical storage technologies. Let’s look at the latest developments in optical storage from PiqlFilm, Folio Photonix, SPhotonix, Cerabyte and Optera Data.
There are several optical recording media, which include PiqlFilm that uses black and white, negative silver-halide film on a polyester base. This method is unique in that it can include recorded human readable instructions and file format and source code for reading data, in addition to digital data. This archive method is being used in some scientific, engineering and historical archives. PiqlFilm is also the initiator of the Arctic World Archive (AWA), a repository for world memory located in Northern Norway on the Arctic Ocean.
Folio Photonics is a company which has developed a multilayer optical recording system for archiving applications which can result in photothermal recording similar to Blu-ray optical discs with either reflective or fluorescent recording technologies. Their technology uses photosensitive dyes dispersed in a co-extruded polymer matrix to create a reflective or fluorescent optical media. This photosensitive material has a strong optical absorption at 405nm, the wavelength used for conventional Blu-ray discs.
Microsoft and the University of Southampton explored volumetric archive recording in fused silica using a fast laser, starting several years ago. This approach is a write once method with a media that should be stable for 100’s of years and was shown to store up to 360TB of data on a 5-inch glass plate. The Southampton researchers started a company, SPhontonix, to commercialize this technology. The image below shows the SPhotonix optical storage concept.
The SPhotonix 5D Memory Crystal was an important element in the plot of the last Mission Impossible movie. The company received additional funding in November 2025 and I am acting as an advisor to SPhotonix. A 5D Memory Crystal containing a copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy was launched into orbit in2018 during the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch, in the glove compartment of the red Tesla Roadster. In June 2025 a 5D Memory Crystal containing images of the Chauvet Cave painting from 32,000 years ago were launched into earth s part of The Exploration Company’s first Nyx space capsule. SPhotonix offers custom storage on its 5D Memory Crystals.
Another interesting optical recording contender is Cerabyte, founded in 2020 and with headquarters in Silicon Valley. Cerabyte uses sputtered 10nm ceramic layers on a glass substrate. Data is written encoded in an array of data matrices using a 2-D digital micro mirror with up to 2 million elements simultaneously written by femtosecond laser pulses in the UV spectrum with a write speed of 1GB/s and with less than 1W average power. Reading is done at GB/s data rates using high-speed image sensors and parallel high speed image processing for decoding. The image below shows Cerabyte’s digital recording concept.
Both reading and writing are done across the square substrate by scanning the microscope optics using high-speed XY stages kept in focus using a piezo driven auto focus system enabling random data access. The 9X9 cm media sheets can be recorded on both sides and stacked in cartridges for robotic access similar to that used for conventional optical and magnetic tape libraries. Cerabyte projects media costs below $1/TB by 2030. Cerabyte has significant investments from several players in the digital storage industry, including Pure Storage and Western Digital.
Optera Data’s storage technology takes advantage of changes in the optical absorption/emission characteristics of its recording media at several adjacent laser frequencies during writing and then by reading these changes. These changes are referred to as spectral holes. I have acted as an advisor for Optera Data.
They do this using an optical media which consists of a mixture of nano-particles with many particles lying within the write/read laser spot and the nano-particles have different but adjacent optical emission/absorption frequencies.
The combination of these nano-particles, in which spectral sensitivities are close to and partly overlapping each other, results in a combined spectral emission profile that is called a “top-hat” fluorescence emission profile, that is, the light emitted by the different nano-particles, combine together to make a pattern like that shown in (a) in the figure below.
With this media, tuning the write laser frequency to match that of one of the nano-particle frequencies creates a spectral hole where the nanoparticle emission can be diminished as shown in (b) in the figure below. These spectral holes can have a depth that depends upon the level of laser energy during the spectral hole writing as shown in the figure. Data can be encoded in both the frequency and depth of these spectral holes.
Optera believes that, short term, 1TB discs are feasible with particulate media and medium term, a thin film single layer write once archival disc with high volume manufacturing costs of $1/10TB ($0.10/TB) is possible before the end of the decade. Longer term (say within a decade or so), these costs could be reduced even further, if this technology were implemented as a volumetric recording technology (perhaps even having 10X lower cost, $0.01/TB).
Let’s briefly look at some DNA storage developments in 2025. In May of 2025 Atlas Data Storage was spun out from Twist Bioscience with $155M in seed funding. In November the company announced its Eon 100 Synthetic DNA storage. However, this approach appears far from a commercial product and DNA storage still suffers from slow write and read speeds. It is projected that because of human genomic medicine development the speeds for reading and writing DNA could increase dramatically over the next decade, making archival data storage using synthetic DNA commercially viable.
In January 2025 another synthetic DNA storage startup, Iridia (I am advisor to this company) contributed to a lunar human monument with historical data on the company’s synthetic DNA on board the Dragonfly Aerospace Blue Ghost Lander.
Projections of new optical storage archiving systems promise 1PB raw capacity optical cartridges by the 2030’s, compared to the possible 365TB raw capacity cartridge projections for LTO Gen 14. Optical storage and even DNA storage could be a significant contender for the digital archive market.
