With the amount of data storage required for our daily lives growing, and available technology becoming saturated, we’re in desparate need of a new method of data storage.

The standard magnetic hard disk drive (HDD)—like what’s probably in your laptop computer—has reached its limit, holding a maximum of a few terabytes. Standard optical disk technologies, like compact disc (CD), digital video disc (DVD) and Blu-ray disc, are restricted by their two-dimensional nature—they just store data in one plane—and also by a physical law called the diffraction limit, based on the wavelength of light, which constrains our ability to focus light to a very small volume.

And then there’s the lifetime of the memory itself to consider. HDDs, as we’ve all experienced in our personal lives, may last only a few years before things start to behave strangely or just fail outright. DVDs and similar media are advertised as having a storage lifetime of hundreds of years. In practice this may be cut down to a few decades, assuming the disk is not rewritable. Rewritable disks degrade on each rewrite.

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