data storage

14 Articles

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With Affordable Storage Options Dwindling, Where To Store Our Data?

April 6, 2026 by 40 Comments

These days our appetite for more data storage is larger than ever, with video files larger, photo resolutions higher, and project files easily zipping past a few hundred MB. At the same time our options for data storage are becoming more and more limited. For the longest time we could count on there always being a newer, roomier, faster, and cheaper form of storage to come along, but those days would seem to be over.

We can look back and laugh at low capacity USB Flash drives of the early 2000s, yet the first storage drive to hit 1 TB capacity did so in 2007, with a Hitachi Deskstar 7k100, only for that level of capacity in PCs to not really be exceeded nineteen years later.

We also had Blu-ray discs (BD) promise to cram the equivalent of dozens of DVDs onto a single BD, with two- and even four-layer BDs storing up to a one-hundred-and-twenty-eight GB. Yet today optical media is dying a slow death as the sole remaining cheap storage option. NAND Flash storage has only increased in price, and the options for those of us who have large cold storage requirements would seem to be decreasing every day.

So what is the economical solution here? Invest in LTO tapes using commercial left-overs, or give up and sign up for Cloud Storage™ for the low-low price of a monthly recurring fee?

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Inside Project Silica, Now On Bakeware

February 27, 2026 by 35 Comments

You see it all the time in science fiction: the heroes find old data, read it, and learn how to save the day. But how realistic is that? Forget aliens. Could you read a stack of punch cards or a 9-track tape right now? Probably not, and those are just a handful of decades in the past. Fast forward a few centuries, and punch cards will decay, and tapes will lose their coating. More modern storage is just as bad. It simply isn’t made to last for thousands of years. Microsoft has Project Silica, which aims to store data in quartz glass with a potential lifetime of many thousands of years.

As you might expect, this is a write-once technology. Lasers write the data, and polarization-sensitive microscopes read it back. Electromagnetic fields don’t matter. You can’t accidentally change the data while reading. A square glass platter the size of a DVD can hold about 7 TB of data.

While the program is not a new one, they’ve recently published results using ordinary borosilicate glass (like your Pyrex baking dish is made from) as a storage medium. They say writing is also more efficient, and reading now requires only one camera instead of the three in the original system. The paper identifies birefringent voxel writing, phase voxels, and more.

Obviously, this isn’t for the casual project. But we have to wonder if hackers could do something similar with lower densities, for example. Unlike other methods we’ve seen, no DNA is involved.

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A Friendly Reminder That Your Unpowered SSDs Are Probably Losing Data

November 26, 2025 by 48 Comments

Save a bunch of files on a good ol’ magnetic hard drive, leave it in a box, and they’ll probably still be there a couple of decades later. The lubricants might have all solidified and the heads jammed in place, but if you can get things moving, you’ll still have your data. As explained over at [XDA Developers], though, SSDs can’t really offer the same longevity.

It all comes down to power. SSDs are considered non-volatile storage—in that they hold on to data even when power is removed. However, they can only do so for a rather limited amount of time. This is because of the way NAND flash storage works. It involves trapping a charge in a floating gate transistor to store a single bit of data. You can power down an SSD, and the trapped charge in all the NAND flash transistors will happily stay put. But over longer periods of time, from months to years, that charge can leak out. When this happens, data is lost.

Depending on your particular SSD, and the variety of NAND flash it uses (TLC, QLC, etc), the safe storage time may be anywhere from a few months to a few years. The process takes place faster at higher temperatures, too, so if you store your drives in a warm area, you could see surprisingly rapid loss.

Ultimately, it’s worth checking your drive specs and planning accordingly. Going on a two-week holiday? Your PC will probably be just fine switched off. Going to prison for three to five years with only a slim chance of parole? Maybe back up to a hard drive first, or have your cousin switch your machine on now and then for safety’s sake.

On a vaguely related note, we’ve even seen SSDs that can self-destruct on purpose. If you’ve got the low down on other neat solid-state stories, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.

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Copying Commodore Data Tapes, 40 Years Late

February 28, 2025 by 41 Comments

Unless you handle the backups for a large corporation, bank, or government entity, you likely haven’t stored much data to tape recently. But magnetic storage used to be fairly mainstream back in the 1980s for all kinds of computer programs. Plenty of computers used standard cassette tapes for this too but you couldn’t just copy them with standard audio equipment. You’d need something like this 1560 datasette from [Jan].

The core problem with using Hi-Fi equipment to copy tapes storing data instead of audio is that data tapes need to be much more precise in order to avoid losses that might not be noticeable in an audio recording. In the 80s computer companies like Commodore built tape drives specifically for their computers, so [Jan]’s project uses two of these 1530 drives to build this “1560” datasette. (No working 1530 hardware was harmed in this build.) An inverter circuit in one tape deck is used to provide the signal to write the data to the other tape, reliably copying data from these data tapes in a way Hi-Fi never could.

[Jan] does lament not having something like this back in the 80s when the Commodore was in its heyday, but there’s still a dedicated retrocomputing scene for these machines that will get plenty of use out of projects like this. If you need to go the other direction in time, there are also interfaces that allow data tapes from old Commodores to be read by modern computers with USB.

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A Modem As A Cassette Interface

January 24, 2025 by 20 Comments

At least some in the audience will at some time in the distant past have loaded or saved a program on cassette, with an 8-bit home computer. The machine would encode binary as a series of tones which could be recorded to the tape and then later retrieved. If you consider the last sentence you’ll quickly realize that it’s not too far away from what a modem does, so can a modem record to cassette and decode it back afterwards? [Jesse T] set out to give it a try, and as it turns out, yes you can.

The modem talks and listens to the cassette recorder via circuitry that provides some signal conditioning and amplification, as well as making a dial tone such that the modem thinks it’s talking to a real phone line. An Arduino steps in as dial tone creator.

Of course, this is hardly a viable solution to 21st century data storage need, but that’s hardly the point as it’s a cool hack. We like it, and oddly we’ve seen a similar technique used with a retrocomputer in the past.

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Unlimited Cloud Storage YouTube Style

February 22, 2024 by 76 Comments

[Adam Conway] wanted to store files in the cloud. However, if you haven’t noticed, unlimited free storage is hard to find. We aren’t sure if he wants to use the tool he built seriously, but he decided that if he could encode data in a video format, he could store his files on YouTube. Does it work? It does, and you can find the code on GitHub.

Of course, the efficiency isn’t very good. A 7 K image, for example, yielded a 9-megabyte video. If we were going to store files on YouTube, we’d encrypt them, too, making it even worse.

The first attempt was to break the file into pieces and encode them as QR codes. Makes sense, but it didn’t work out. To get enough data into each frame, the modules (think pixels) in the QR code were small. Combined with video compression, the system was unreliable.

Simplicity rules. Each frame is 1920×1080 and uses a black pixel as a one and a white pixel as a zero. In theory, this gives about 259 kbytes per frame. However, to help avoid problems decoding due to video compression, the real bits use a 5×5 pixel block, so that means you get about 10 kbytes of data per frame.

The code isn’t perfect. It can add things to the end of a file, for example, but that would be easy to fix. The protocol could use error correction and compression. You might even build encryption into it or store more data — old school cassette-style — using the audio channel. Still, as a proof of concept, it is pretty neat.

This might sound like a new idea, but people way back in the early home computer days could back up data to VCRs. This isn’t even the first time we’ve seen it done with YouTube.

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Storage Media Forgotten

December 18, 2023 by 24 Comments

These days, cheap removable storage is no problem. USB sticks are virtually free at moderate capacity and not unreasonable, even at relatively large sizes. They are rugged, work across platforms, and don’t require any exotic interfaces. But this hasn’t always been the case.  In the 1990s, people wanted to store too much data for floppies, but weren’t willing to shell out for removable hard drives or tapes. Many companies identified this opportunity with, perhaps, the most successful being Iomega with the Zip drive. But there were others, including the Avatar Shark that [This Does Not Compute] remembers in a video you can see below.

Haven’t heard of the Shark? We had not either, but reviewers seemed to like it. The drive would fit in your pocket if you had a fairly large pocket. The 250 MB cartridge was smaller (but thicker) than a 3.5-inch floppy. It performed ok and connected to the parallel port which was common in those days.

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