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Microsoft Data Storage

Microsoft's New 10,000-Year Data Storage Medium: Glass (arstechnica.com) 51

Posted by msmash from the don't-throw-stones dept.
Microsoft Research has published a paper in Nature detailing Project Silica, a working demonstration that uses femtosecond lasers to etch data into small slabs of glass at a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter and a maximum capacity of 4.84 terabytes per slab. The slabs themselves are 12 cm by 12 cm and just 2 mm thick, and Microsoft's accelerated aging experiments suggest the data etched into them would remain stable for over 10,000 years at room temperature, requiring zero energy to preserve.

The system writes data by firing laser pulses lasting just 10^-15 seconds to create tiny features called voxels inside the glass, each capable of storing more than one bit, and reads it back using phase contrast microscopy paired with a convolutional neural network trained to interpret the images. Writing remains the main bottleneck -- four lasers operating simultaneously achieve 66 megabits per second, meaning a full slab would take over 150 hours to write, though the team believes adding more lasers is feasible.
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Microsoft's New 10,000-Year Data Storage Medium: Glass

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  • How dat work? (Score:3)

    by methano ( 519830 ) on Thursday February 19, 2026 @04:51PM (#65999592)
    "each capable of storing more than one bit". I think of a voxel as the smallest usable volume in a 3-D array. How do they get more than one bit? Are they stored in shades of grey? Am I going to have to RTF?

    • Probably similar to how multi-level (MLC) NAND flash memory works, but I didn't read the article either

    • If a voxel is assigned a space where it can be in one of four positions, then it encodes 2 bits.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      They encode data in phase, so the number of bits per voxel depend on the sensitivity of the phase detector.

      They are also able to encode data from multiple directions, so the phase can be different depending on the angle that light enters from. How many different angles they can have will depend on the precision that they can move the emitter with.

      Would be nice if it ever came to market and was affordable, but I'm not optimistic.

  • The cost is the key (Score:3)

    by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Thursday February 19, 2026 @04:52PM (#65999596)
    If this archives a terabyte cheaply, it will be a wonderful thing! We need good and cheap archival storage and have not had many options for a while now...

  • Reminds me of a prototype laser storage system I saw in 1965 during a guided tour of the Bell labs in Murray Hill. It used lasers to burn spots on a slab of optical material, dont recall any performance or capacity specs -- been a long time. Sure any patents are long expired, but then so is the Murray Hill labs.

    • Or imagine you could use a laser to write data on a spinning disk. That would be amazing!
      • cd-r comes back as glass to be written to that would be neat.

      • I remember reading an article around '79-'81 about a laser storage system being developed that would become compact disc. I think commercially available music CDs were first released in 1983.

  • Zero obsolescence. (Score:3)

    by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Thursday February 19, 2026 @05:04PM (#65999614)

    requiring zero energy to preserve.

    Uh huh. Assuming we still have access to a medium reader even 100 years from now. Much less 10,000. Including the native knowledge the read it.

    What's it written in? Wait don't tell me. You ironically wrote data on glass in Rust, didn't you? Nerds gonna nerd.

    • Presumably in 100 years our AI overlords will be able to take high resolution images of these slabs and instantly decode the contents regardless of the data format while picking through the bones of our collapsed civilization.

    • Given that we cannot read material stored in various electronic formats even 50 years ago, this seems like a reasonable doubt. Is there really that much material worth archiving anyway? If you want to last forever, engrave it stone or stainless steel in a human readable format. Then remember that 1,000 years from now, almost no one will care, it anyone is around to read it at all.

      • Well, in recent news, they've found a 52 years old tape containing pretty much the only known copy of Unix v4 and they managed to recover its contents, in an almost artisanal way. The thing is, we still know how to read magnetic tapes, even if the specific format is unknown we could make do.
        Also, we still can play those olde gramophone disks, because even like more than a century after we still know about how they works.
        So it's safe to assume that in 100 years or so, such media will still be readable, even

      • ..Then remember that 1,000 years from now, almost no one will care, it anyone is around to read it at all.

        Just remember that some would give their proverbial left nut to know what the hell is on many ancient scrolls carefully stored for decades and still being scrutinized today.

        And that doesn’t even touch the Antikythera mechanism.

        Yeah. People will care in 1,000 years even if Gen ADHD doesn’t after a hour.

        • Actually, very few people care. Most people cannot be troubled to learn about the history of twenty years ago, much less thousands. It is a matter for specialists, not the general public and most of the general public would happily see them disappear. Also, I am not convinced that anyone (or at least anyone who can read) will still be living in a thousand years given the way our "civilization" is trending.
    • 10,000 years nobody gonna care or its on a new format but thats the point.

  • I've been seeing stuff about storage tech like this since the Tamarak days in the 1990s with holographic storage. Nothing ever pans out. In fact, we have far less usable storage than the 1990s. Back then, we had floppy, Travan, 4mm, 8mm, DLT, Ditto, HDD, flash (primitive), phase change, and optical.

    Now, we have flash drives, HDD and SDD, with LTO being priced out of almost everyone's price range. We have cloud storage, but that's someone else's HDD, SSD, tape or flash drive.

    We need to get actual media b

  • In future Microsoft glass-storage news ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday February 19, 2026 @05:22PM (#65999644)

    though the team believes adding more lasers is feasible

    640k lasers should be enough for anyone. :-)

  • They haven't named it CoPilot Glass Hole Backup yet?

  • Microsoft would be the ones investigating how well windows can store data.

  • IIRC glass is a very slow flowing, ultra extremly viscose liquid. Old glass in church windows is thicker at the bottom due to this. Are they sure that glass can retain micro-etched information for 10k years considering this?

    • -> "IIRC glass is a very slow flowing, ultra extremely viscose liquid. Old glass in church windows is thicker at the bottom due to this."

      Maybe...

      https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glass/glass.html

      "Conclusion

      The question "Is glass solid or liquid?" has no clear answer.  "...

    • The glass is thicker at the bottom due to the manufacturing process back then.

      Glass is a solid.

  • Glass at room temperature is a very viscous liquid. If the slab is stored vertically, I wonder is a 100 year storage could cause enough deformation so that it gets difficult to read the data back.

  • If I had 1GB of magic storage for every allegedly impending storage solution I'd never have to delete anything again.

  • I would be more worried about the loss of ability to read the data format than anything else.
    A simple example is in the 1992 Nickelodeon Time Capsule, to be opened in 2042, they put in a VHS copy of Home Alone. Now, who would have a VHS machine today, let alone in 2042? With this example, that's assuming that the tape itself didn't disintegrate, demagnetize, or get eaten by mold, as we're talking about a new medium for the data.
    I'm in the middle of archiving all my parents files from the 80s and 90s. They m

    • Who assumes in 10,000 years, anybody will give a shit what it says ;-)

    • In far less than 10,000 yes, we will be able to throw any bitstream in the computer, define as many parameters as we might happen to know (e.g., "This is a document file created with XYZ software"), or perhaps none at all, and have the computer grok out the meaningful data stored therein. CDs can be read with electron microscopes if need be. There will always be a way to recover data; it just might not be cheap and easy.

  • how do we read the data when the knowledge of the trained neutral network is long gone?

    • hopefully by then they have given up copyrighting everything for 10,000 years and you can just ask your favorite llm.
  • This is exact, applied science, why put magic into it? You either detect a burned in dot or not. So convoluted neural network sounds like just another confusing tech moneyshuffling project.
    • I asked a similar question of the Microsoft Research team who developed the core technology before it transitioned to product development. Their answer was that in the long term, of course you build a signal processing pipeline from first principles. But doing that will take 18 or so months of engineering and testing. The benefit of a neural network is it can be trained in a day, with the drawback that using it is much less efficient than an engineered pipeline. So until you've finalized on the exact encodi
  • This means that Windows 11 will be preserved for another 10,000 years....

  • I'm honestly shocked Microsoft would even publicly discuss this. Don't they like forced obsolescence to justify continued sales?

    • Don't worry. The software to read this glass storage will require a subscription and need to run on 128GB of RAM and a 24-core processor, which will double every 18 months for the foreseeable future.

  • Glass is a fluid. As everyone on the old slashdot knows, and would have already noted, it flows, just very slowly. You can see this on glass from the middle ages.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      Except for the glass that were accidentally inserted upside down in the frame. There it flows upwards.

  • If it were to be 10,000 years old, chances are good that it either had quite some time in the sun or in a cold environment (like under earth) that avoids the sun. Where exactly would one guarantee room temperature for thousands of years?

  • Great experiment but of course glass has some pretty obvious downsides. We tried something similar some years ago using a DVD laser and coated glass. It is extremely reliable and thankfully cheap. The problem is... how do you read it? There's no instructions.

    The worst movie ever so see a screen... Contact... should have taught everyone in this business the rules of this.

    "The medium is irrelevant if no one can read it"

    and

    "You have to leave Jodi Foster a key to be able to build a machine"

    So, the beauty of met

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