Q&A with David Trachy, Senior Director of Emerging Markets at storage company Spectra Logic, on the resurgence of tape for archival storage, DNA storage, more
Desire Athow / TechRadar : Thanks: @smashdawg
Context & Ripple Effects
Spectra Logic's David Trachy making the case for tape lands at an odd moment for storage media: magnetic storage just had a banner run, with data storage stocks leading the S&P 500 in 2025, and Seagate and rivals are pouring engineering into heat-assisted magnetic recording to keep spinning disks relevant — IDC expects data center HDD spending to hit $22B by 2028. Tape's resurgence is the other side of that same archival-demand story.
On the far horizon, Trachy's interest in DNA storage points at work like Catalog Technologies' $9M emergence from stealth to commercialize DNA-based data storage, and at exotic long-life media such as the 360 TB 5D optical disc researchers demonstrated. The Q&A frames a market where each medium is being pushed toward its best-fit role rather than one format winning outright.
First-order effects
- Trachy's pitch positions Spectra Logic's tape libraries as the low-cost, durable answer for archival capacity, directly contesting the same data-center archive budgets HDD makers are defending through their HAMR investments.
- By elevating DNA storage in the conversation, Spectra Logic signals it sees tape as today's archival layer but acknowledges the long-retention market may ultimately move beyond magnetic media entirely.
Second-order effects
- If tape keeps winning archive workloads, Seagate and Western Digital face pressure to justify HDDs on performance-per-dollar rather than pure capacity, sharpening their reliance on next-generation recording technology.
- DNA storage startups like Catalog gain a credibility boost when established archival vendors publicly treat the technology as a serious successor rather than a lab curiosity.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward a formally tiered storage stack — flash for speed, HDD for active capacity, tape for deep archives, DNA or glass-like media for multi-decade retention — with vendors competing within their tier instead of across all of them.
The trend: Archival storage is stratifying by media economics, with tape consolidating the deep-archive tier today while DNA and optical research lays claim to the decades-long horizon.