Microsoft Laser Breakthrough Stores Data on Everyday Glass for 10,000 Years

Microsoft has achieved significant advancements in its glass-based data-storage technology. This breakthrough allows ordinary glassware, such as that used in cookware and oven doors, to store terabytes of data for 10,000 years.

Credit: MICROSOFT

Improvements to data writing and reading techniques, alongside a new storage method, make this technology more accessible than before. Scientists outlined these latest innovations in the journal Nature.

The technology has been under development since 2019 as "Project Silica" and has seen steady improvements. The new study demonstrated encoding data onto common borosilicate glass, a durable, heat-resistant material often found in kitchens.

Previously, data could only be stored on pure fused silica glass, which is expensive to produce and has limited sources. The team also showcased several new data-encoding and data-reading techniques.

Richard Black, partner research manager at Microsoft, commented on the development. He stated the advance addresses key barriers to commercialisation, specifically the cost and availability of storage media.

"We have unlocked the science for parallel high-speed writing and developed a technique to permit accelerated aging tests on the written glass, suggesting that the data should remain intact for at least 10,000 years," Black said.

A team successfully fitted 4.8 terabytes of data onto 301 layers within a piece of glass measuring 2 by 120 millimetres. This capacity is equivalent to approximately 200 4K movies.

The writing rate achieved was 3.13 megabytes per second (MB/s). This speed is considerably slower than hard drives, which typically write at about 160 MB/s, or solid-state drives, which can reach around 7,000 MB/s.

However, the significant advantage of glass storage is its exceptional longevity. While most hard drives and solid-state drives last up to about 10 years, data stored on glass is projected to endure for more than 10,000 years.

This extreme longevity and stability position glass- and ceramics-based storage devices primarily for archival purposes. They are designed to serve as a highly reliable, long-term repository for generated data, rather than for day-to-day device usage.

Microsoft scientists previously outlined plans to preserve music in the Global Music Vault in Norway using this concept. This news also follows an independent breakthrough in DNA storage, where 360 terabytes of data could be held in 0.8 kilometres of DNA.

The study revealed several discoveries that contribute to more efficient, cost-effective writing and reading on glass. First, advances in birefringent voxel writing with laser pulses were detailed.

Birefringence refers to double refraction, and voxels are three-dimensional pixels. Scientists developed a pseudo-single pulse, an improvement over the previous two pulses, where one pulse splits after polarisation to form the first pulse for one voxel and the second for another.

This was combined with parallel writing capabilities, allowing many data voxels to be written simultaneously in close proximity. This significantly increases the overall writing speed.

The scientists also devised a new storage type called "phase voxels." Data can be encoded into the phase change of the glass, a shift in material phase caused by changes in energy and pressure, instead of its polarisation, which is the method used in birefringent voxels.

This method is possible with just a single pulse, and the team developed a new technique to read data stored in this manner. Finally, the team found a way to identify aging data storage within the glass voxels.

This method, used alongside standard accelerated aging techniques, confirmed that the stored data could last for over 10,000 years.

In future work, the team will focus on enhancing writing and reading technologies, including improvements to the lasers that write data into the glass storage devices. They also plan to explore different glass compositions to identify the ideal material for this data format.

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• Microsoft's "Project Silica" can store terabytes of data on ordinary borosilicate glass for 10,000 years.

• This breakthrough makes the technology more accessible and cost-effective than previous methods using expensive fused silica glass.

• A piece of glass measuring 2 by 120 millimetres can store 4.8 terabytes of data, equivalent to 200 4K movies.

Source: LIVE SCIENCE PLUS