The cassette tape made a comeback in 2025 thanks to a DNA upgrade
With a storage capacity of 36 petabytes, a DNA-based cassette tape can hold every song every recorded, and it could be on the market within five years
Technology
With a storage capacity of 36 petabytes, a DNA-based cassette tape can hold every song every recorded, and it could be on the market within five years
30 December 2025
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The DNA tape can store vastly more information than a standard cassette
Jiankai Li et al. 2025
In a new take on a technology from the 1960s, this year, researchers created a cassette tape that uses DNA instead of iron oxide to encode information on a plastic tape.
It can hold a phenomenal amount of information: while a traditional cassette tape stores around 12 songs on each side, the DNA tape can hold every song ever recorded.
At 10 megabytes a song, 100 metres of the DNA cassette tape can hold more than 3 billion pieces of music. The total data storage capacity is 36 petabytes of data – equivalent to 36,000 terabyte hard drives.
Xingyu Jiang at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Guangdong, China, and his colleagues created the cassette by printing synthetic DNA molecules onto a plastic tape. “We can design its sequence so that the order of the DNA bases (A, T, C, G) represents digital information, just like 0s and 1s in a computer,” he told in September. This means it can store any type of digital file, whether text, image, audio or video.