Microsoft team creates data-storage system that lasts for millennia
nature.com
nature.com
And the storage density is limited by all kinds of effects that I won't even get into it but you can roughly assume its at best half or even less of that and then it starts becoming much less impressive.
Yes you can microwave a slab of glass or go diving with it and it will still be intact but unless we make machines that read and store data much more easily, like significantly absurdly more easily, this is the biggest pipe dream of them all.
Cool tech though :)
Hard drives where the size of a car decades ago, we could now have archival storage of the same physical size that can hold petabytes (just guessing, didn't do the actual math).
Blu-ray (1×) ~36 Mbit/s
MS-Glass (single beam) ~25.6 Mbit/s
MS-Glass (multi-beam) ~65.9 Mbit/s
Definitely. If it actually achieves those speeds it's perfectly reasonable for long-term/cold storage.
Was 4k not enough?
Am I the only one who's still content with 720p?
Write only medium!
This can be easily done many times faster than the writing, which is why the article is focused on the progress that Microsoft has achieved in increasing the writing speed, in comparison with their prototypes from a few years ago. It is also easy to make separate readers that are much cheaper and smaller than the writers.
The most important limitation of this device is the current very high cost of the lasers used for writing. Had they been cheaper, the writing speed could be increased by adding more lasers.
Microsoft argues that if this kind of short-pulse lasers would be mass produced, they could become much cheaper, like it has happened with the many lasers that are used now everywhere in optical fiber communication and with optical discs.
For now. this is a chicken-and-egg problem. This kind of optical storage cannot be converted into a commercial product because the lasers are too expensive and the lasers are too expensive because there is no high-volume market for them.
Even the current level of performance would be enough for myself. If I could afford such a device, I would buy it instantly, to stop worrying about having to buy periodically new HDDs, to migrate my data from old HDDs and to buy periodically new tape drives, to migrate my data from tape formats that become obsolete.
I thought I was experiencing some Mandela affect, had to Bing it. This is from 2022 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/project-silic...
> Microsoft began to build on their work in 2017. Although Kazansky’s approach maximizes durability and the density of data, in the latest work, Microsoft has gone for practicality. They explore a method that enables data to be written faster and decoded more reliably than did Project Silica’s previous iterations, says Black, and it uses cheaper borosilicate glass, rather than harder-to-make fused silica.
Following your link, I found a prototype of the media storage system (2023) with just 2828 views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnK-uB4OsgU
Unlike before, at the current performance this kind of optical storage could have actually been used in practice, had the writing lasers not been so expensive.
For a given amount of data, such glass slabs, which have the size of CD cases, would occupy a volume of about half of that required for the highest-capacity HDDs and about the same as tape cartriges.
The writing speed is similar with the file downloading speed over the Internet from most sources that throttle their connections, instead of allowing full speed.
So a rough estimate, at the size of UMD, used in Playstation Portable, slightly smaller than the size of Mini Disc, it could store 1TB.
I assume we could do double layer in the future for 2TB.
For comparison that is roughly 1000x times the capacity of UMD. I would love to have this. Burn a few of these as backup and call it a day.
What matters is the capacity per volume, per mass and per dollar.
The capacities per volume and per mass for these glass slabs are already very competitive. They are about the same as for the best tape cartridges currently available. The capacity per volume is about twice better than for the best HDDs, and the capacity per mass is much better than that, because HDDs are very heavy.
If such optical storage had not been so expensive as it is for now, it would have already been much better than any cloud storage. The slow writing speed is similar to that of file downloading or uploading over the Internet. Reading can be done much faster than writing, because it uses ordinary lasers and a video camera, not the very expensive femtosecond-pulse lasers used for writing.
I think we should stick to proven solutions for millennia-robust information storage and paint it on walls inside pyramids.
Unfortunately, its creator had only modest knowledge of linguistics, so there are many features of Esperanto that can be considered as mistakes, and they have contributed to its little success.
Some of the artificial languages that have been designed later are much better than Esperanto, but they have achieved even less notoriety than it.
What has doomed all artificial languages, despite the fact that some of them would have been much better than English for international relations and for the publication of scientific and technical literature, has been the absolute dominance of USA over the entire world after the end of WWII.
This unbalanced relationship between USA and everyone else has forced the use of English both in commercial relations and in the scientific and technical publications, excluding all alternatives and replacing not only any artificial languages, but also the European languages that previously had been more important than English, i.e. German and French.
Wheres my futuristic storage guys?
There are a couple incomplete tales in that 3-volume work and I really wish they'd had a more stable storage medium, because now I'm stuck with accidental millennia-old cliffhangers.
I find old writings extremely useful, including many of those that are 2500 years old or even older. The really useful old writings are those in bilingual editions, which allow you to skim quickly in English through passages in which you are not interested at the moment, but then allow you to read the original language to see what the author really meant. Most English translations are very bad when you have a scientific interest in the meaning of the text, because the translators are usually completely ignorant about mathematics, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, biology, technologies and so on, so they fail to translate correctly anything that includes words with special meanings in those domains.
Unfortunately, nowadays fewer people read old writings, which is obvious in the deluge of publications that claim that various new things have been discovered or invented, but those supposedly "new" things are old things that were well known decades or even centuries earlier. Worse, the "new" things usually were not only known previously, but previously better alternatives were already known which are ignored by the "inventors" of the "new" things.
It is well known, or it should be well known, that the space of solutions for many technical problems contains a finite number of alternatives, among which at a given time one is the best. However, which is the best changes in time, depending on the evolution of technologies in other domains. Over a long enough time interval, it is frequent that the optimum solution cycles through all alternatives, going back to a solution that had been preferred a long time before, but which had then been abandoned for some time.
2500 years old writings do not provide detailed solutions for present problems, e.g. how to design the schematics for the power supply of a laser. Nevertheless, they may still provide logical thinking frameworks that are as valid today as they were millennia ago, and they also show the original form of various concepts that have evolved through time until their current form. Understanding the reasons why certain things have evolved through history is essential for understanding in which direction they should be changed today.
Those who believe that we are today better in all domains in comparison with our ancestors from 2000 years ago, are delusional. I consider a few of the laws that were valid in certain ancient societies as greatly superior to the laws that have replaced them in most modern countries.
(An example is that there are now a lot of countries that claim to be "republics", not to mention a certain US party. All such claims are lies, because today there exists no republic on Earth. The principle on which the Roman Republic was grounded, and which distinguished it from other forms of government, was that, with temporary exceptions for emergencies like wars, plagues or natural calamities, no important public executive function should be occupied by a single human, but only by 2 or more humans with equal power, so that the abuse attempts of 1 of them would be stopped by the others. There are also examples in more rational and more efficient penal systems, which did not include stupid punishment methods, like prison, but where any non-irreversible kind of damage (e.g. theft, fraud, non-permanent bodily harm) was punished by a fine, but not by a fine equal to the damage, but by a fine that was a big multiple of the damage from double to 10 times, to discourage such acts.)
Why do you think there is a new GTK release every couple of years ? Or a new rust compiler release every couple of months ?
The idea isn't new of course, just think back to Dave removing HAL's glass/crystal memory modules in 2001. Clarke/Kubrick were thinking along those lines in the 1960s.
There isn't really a benefit. Our durably-stored several-thousand-year-old records suffer from various problems:
- They're hard to understand.
- They tend not to be relevant to much.
- Most of them have gotten lost. They're not gone, but it would be extremely expensive to find them.
Interestingly, these are the same problems that occur with stored data of much more recent vintage. But they get worse and worse over time, and the fact that the storage medium itself doesn't degrade does nothing to help. It tends to make those usability problems worse by giving people a false sense of security that the data is still there, until the cost of recovering it becomes too great and for practical purposes it isn't there anymore.
If something matters, it will be stored on ephemeral media and recopied over time onto more ephemeral media.
A) record (a representative cross-section of) "everything" and leave multiple copies where future archeologists might find it. To avoid things like how present-day archaeologists apparently have holes in the kinds of things they can find, due to different social classes not leaving equally-robust trails.
B) this is "at least as long as I could possibly care about" storage. If I need to retain say financial records for seven years, and then later the government retroactively increases that to 20 years, there's no need to re-archive it all onto new media.
In many countries this "maximum (6 or) 7 years" for financial records is only if the local IRS decides that you're not potentially committing fraud. If they decide you've potentially committed fraud at any time in the past, there's no limit as to how far they can go. Even in the US stuff like (some of the) funds stolen by the Enron scam have been successfully clawed back more than two decades after the fact.
At least that's the case in several EU countries: there's literally no limit if the country's IRS equivalent decides you're potentially committing fraud (or if you did in the past).
Which is insane and totally arbitrary but that's how it is.
In addition to that under a great many KYC/AML excuses, there are banks out there that shall have zero issue asking you to justify the "source of funds" and at times I've had to provide info dating from way more than seven years in the past. I've heard --and I'm not shitting you-- from someone proving he bought for about 5 K EUR of something that went up more than 100x (think Bitcoin or some exceptionally successful stock), that his bank answered something like: "OK, but now that you've proven you actually made 100x, prove us the source of the 5 K EUR in 2013!".
That's what happens to a society when you give too much power to petty people.
There are literally collaborationists out there that are going to fill SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports) when someone can prove he turned 5 K into 500 K not on the 500 K (which are impossible to dispute) but on the 5 K that were used in the first place. That's how jealous and incompetent some people are in this world.
Things became so bad that I now have a Git versioned repo (and backups everywhere) where I keep track of, among other, every single wire transfer above 10 K EUR. I've got stuff dating back to 2001 when I bought my first apartment etc.
Don't underestimate how pathetic and bitter some of the people you'll have to deal with (be it from your local IRS or a bank) are going to be.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-fiction-glas...
[1] https://e6cvd.com/us/material/single-crystalline.html?utm_so...
?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Finding a single crystal sheet of diamond for sale on Google would have taken 3x as long.
Took me a few seconds. Even found some on Amazon.
10,000 years sounds like a good benchmark and isn't as obviously ridiculous as saying a million years at 260°C
Except for hydrogen fluoride (a.k.a. hydrofluoric acid) and for hot and concentrated strong alkalies, biological or chemical agents will not have effects.
The main danger is either breaking the glass or its crystallization at high temperatures. A HDD is also unlikely to survive a drop on a hard floor and high temperatures would demagnetize it much more easily than affecting a glass stab.
Something I've always wondered.. could things like tree rings, or birdsong and other mating rituals (the species can survive only by replicating the sequences) be used for "data storage" by some hypothetical intelligences that think on scales of thousands of years?
Will it run on Linux ?
> The authors of the paper have filed several patents relating to the subject matter contained in this paper in the name of Microsoft Corporation.
Page 12 of the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10042-w.pdf
It's whether Microsoft will be fair and flexible licensing their patents to third-parties.
Otherwise I'd suggest that if they keep it all to themselves and charge like a wounded bull, uptake would be quite limited.
At least until the original patents expires, which might be the better strategic move for third-parties in light of a hostile Microsoft given how long this archival format is expected to last.
In fact, look what we’re doing right now with all our past’s relics!
Now, can someone please help me get some data of this Iomega ZIPdrive disc?