Microsoft Research has announced Project Silica, a method to read/write data into small slabs of glass. The glass offers extreme stability, with experiments suggesting the data would be stable for over 10,000 years at room temperature.
It can write data into small slabs of glass with a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter.
The research, first published in Nature magazine, expalins the system can write up to 4.84TB in a single slab of glass of 12cm x 12cm x 0.2cm in 150 hours.
The researchers have stated that with the right starting chemical, it’s possible to make a glass that is “thermally and chemically stable and is resistant to moisture ingress, temperature fluctuations and electromagnetic interference.”
This technology uses no energy to preserve data and the data can be retrieved rapidly if needed.
This is possible due to the development of femtosecond lasers, that emit pulses that only last 10-15 seconds and can emit millions of them per second, and can cut down write times and allow etching to be focused on a very small area, increasing potential data density.
image: Microsoft Research