Microsoft is making progress in long-term glass storage

Microsoft does Progress in the development of storage media made of glass. These should be able to securely archive data for at least 10,000 years. The sticking point is still the performance of the writing process.

Lasers form structures

The Silica project has been pushed forward by the Redmond research department Microsoft Research for some time. At the center are thin plates made of special borosilicate glass. Femtosecond lasers write tiny structures, so-called voxels, inside them. These are created by ultra-short light pulses in the trillionth of a second range that specifically cause changes in the glass.

Microsoft tested two methods, as shown in a recent research paper: One uses the alignment of microscopic structures to encode multiple information states in a single voxel. The other varies the energy of the laser pulses and creates different refractive properties, which can also store several bits per voxel.

The reading is carried out using high-resolution microscopy, which makes the smallest differences in the refractive index visible. Artificial intelligence analyzes the image data and reconstructs the stored information from it. In addition, an error correction procedure is used, which is also used in modern mobile communications standards, to avoid data loss.

Slow writing speed

The write speed is currently 66 megabits per second. A single glass plate measuring 12 by 12 centimeters can store up to 4.84 terabytes – so it takes several days to write completely. For large-scale projects such as the international Square Kilometer Array radio telescope, which is expected to generate hundreds of petabytes of data annually, various systems working in parallel would be required. Nevertheless, the developers see great potential. Since the data is retained without ongoing energy consumption and can be read out comparatively quickly, glass could play an important role in digital long-term archiving in the future.

Given the rapidly growing volume of data, companies and research institutions are ultimately looking for storage media that are extremely durable, space-saving and energy-efficient. Traditional hard drives or magnetic tapes require regular maintenance and replacement. Glass, on the other hand, does not require any energy when at rest and, with a suitable composition, can withstand heat, moisture and electromagnetic influences.