Microsoft's Project Silica is working on memory storage that works using lasers and glass. This could mean longer term information preservation with up to 10,000 years use.
This new method could make longer term information storage a far more certain thing for archivists, data centres and more.
Microsoft has been working on Project Silica as a way to encode information on glass. A recent breakthrough brings that closer to a reality than ever before.
The idea is to use lasers to write data onto glass which will then be very tough to degrade. That should mean encoding of data which remains unchanged for up to 10,000 years into the future.
Unlike current drives, including even the best PS5 SSDs, this new method uses glass and single pulse lasers to write data. A recent breakthrough, as reported in Nature, allows this tech to work on a far more affordable scale.
Until now this innovation has required expensive fused silica. This latest advancement means the same method can be used, only with borosilicate glass - the same affordable type currently used in kitchen cookware.
While this advancement is great for cost, it also works with technology advancements for ease. That means parallel high-speed writing is possible. The use of femtosecond laser pulses, currently being worked on, could mean even more durable and immutable longer term storage.
The reader has also been advanced and now only requires one camera - rather than as many as four - to access that data written across layers of the glass which is just 2mm thin.
All this should mean more affordable and efficient writing and reading of data using this new storage medium. The fact that it also sounds like the kind of data storage Kryptonians use just adds to the excitement.
Here's hoping these advances mean we get to see this tech in use sooner rather than later. Although not having my embarrassing selfie videos potentially written in servers for 10,000 years perhaps isn't such a bad thing for now.
