It's common to perform longevity testing at higher temperatures to simulate longer lifetimes, in account of nobody has decades of time to actually perform a 1x time test.
That's ~7-18 days per 120mm x 120mm medium (4.8TB).
Glass prices stable for now. Also, the authors make no statement about horizontal vs. vertical storage.
Thanks for digging this up. Every "scientists create new storage medium" is always a disappointment when you get to see the write speeds. This seems decent? At least in "raw" numbers there's nothing obviously making this useless. Let's hope they have a path to quick commercialisation and make it available. If there's any DC adoption will be the real test, I think.
Write speed is probably the least important metric for people that are considering something like this. After everything with storage and longevity is taken care of, improving write speeds is a nice to have, but not the important part.
The reading is the done with a high-resolution video camera and the image is processed to extract the data.
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.
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.
If you watch the movie johnny mnemonic, they throw around data cubes the size of a stamp. Modern nvme ssds weigh around 4 grams per TB. So we've already achieved scifi movie parity :D. The only problem is the price.
I'm a little bit old. When I ordered my first M.2 drive, I had never seen one IRL. I'd assumed about RAM-stick size. Nope! Thumb-sized! The future is amazing! So... give it enough time and eventually the mundane will scratch that itch, I guess?
Glass is one of the more stable things we can make. This seems pretty good! I don't have an application that requires ten thousand years of storage but I'm sure someone out there does!
I have read a variation of this headline once every 2 years since the early 2000s, yet never seen it turn into something real (that a consumer / enterprise can buy).
> 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.
They report now significant progresses in writing speed, data density, and also in cost, in comparison with their prototypes from a few years ago.
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.
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?
LOL I've done holographic data storage in borosilicate glass using fs laser pulses for my masters thesis in physics more than a decade ago and guess what, this is not going anywhere. The claims are all wildly exaggerated also. Lots of buzzwords micro nano plasma explosions but the truth is hidden in the details: needs specialist hardware... Yeah like a 50.000 USD femto second laser setup that needs an entire basement and you wearing ski googles at all times to not get blind type of specialist hardware. Guess we're all gonna put that in our living rooms, won't we?
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.
It doesn't have to be consumer hardware to be economically viable. I can imagine something like this replacing or complementing tape storage at data centers. We already have hard drives filled with gas for dust-proofing. For archival storage it does not have to be fast (in terms of latency) it just needs to be reliable with high data density.
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).
Data loses its usefulness and relevance with time. Unless it's updatable, just archiving is not going to be useful. Just like how we don't find some 2000 years old writings any useful now, except for museum storage.
We've had data storage that lasts for millennia for several thousand years already. The invention of millennia-long storage more or less coincided with the invention of writing.
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.
It's good to know people are finally working on long-term nonvolatile storage. To date, just about every storage syatem we've developed has had a storter lifespan than the previous one, NAND versus magnetic storage for instance.
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.
I like that they call it a “deployable archival system” that kind of sounds like they’ve invented a laser that can read/write this stuff that can last for 10,000 years
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 71.2 ms ] threadWrite 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.
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.
I think we should stick to proven solutions for millennia-robust information storage and paint it on walls inside pyramids.
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.
Wheres my futuristic storage guys?
Now, can someone please help me get some data of this Iomega ZIPdrive disc?
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.
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?
In fact, look what we’re doing right now with all our past’s relics!
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).
Why do you think there is a new GTK release every couple of years ? Or a new rust compiler release every couple of months ?
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.
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.