Data is a rather important part of our lives. Anyone who has lost their phone or had a hard drive crash will know that. We have been covering data these last couple of months, with issues like the threat to data security, the crisis we are facing in data storage, and potential new ways of storing our data. One technology that’s in the pipeline is glass storage. I thought I would find out more about this one.
It’s clear that we are generating data at a staggering pace and that we need it for our long-term survival. Meanwhile, today’s magnetic media are not going to be a sustainable solution. Magnetic tape degrades over time, and keeping data on it is expensive and energy-intensive. Data centres need huge amounts of energy for cooling. AI, and apparently also cryptocurrency mining (surprisingly), are accelerating this growing demand. The International Energy Agency says that data centres worldwide could consume as much as 1000 TWh in 2026.
Researchers at the University of Southampton, together with Microsoft Research, are storing terabytes of data on glass chips the size of a drinks coaster.
They have created small hard drives made of glass that they say can each store 360 terabytes of data for an almost infinite amount of time – or 13,8 billion years, as they rather precisely say. These small glass squares can be baked, flooded, or demagnetised without degrading. They are calling it Project Silica.
Sand is the raw material
Data is stored in glass discs manufactured from sand. Project Silica uses a femtosecond laser that emits super-short optical pulses to etch data onto a small 3 x 3 cm piece of glass (a femtosecond is a quadrillionth of a second). What sets it apart is its multidimensional encoding. It doesn’t only use the usual three dimensions of length, width and height, but also the polarisation and intensity of light – hence the name 5D storage. This results in a data density way beyond that of the usual storage methods.
Microsoft has demonstrated how an archive based on this technology could work. Thousands of glass slides line library shelves. When you need to retrieve data, robots move vertically and horizontally to locate the slide and take it to the reader.
Polarising microscopes scan the surface of the glass and capture the data by detecting the changes in light intensity caused by the encoded patterns. The captured data is decoded back into its original digital form using AI algorithms that interpret the patterns recorded on the glass. These sheets can remain offline for centuries or millennia until they need to be accessed.
The durability of glass
The biggest advantage of glass as a data storage medium is its durability. It’s a low-cost solution that’s resistant to water, electromagnetic pulses, extreme temperatures and surface scratching. Once data is printed onto the glass and placed in the library it cannot be changed, making it ideal for preserving content like scientific records, plant data, books or movies. For context, the Library of Congress has over 3000 terabytes of data. With just a few of these discs, the whole library’s holdings could be preserved.
Archiving with glass storage archiving would be very secure because it’s offline. It would be perfect for sensitive industries like finance, scientific research and healthcare. They would be safe from the ransomware attacks aimed at data stored in the cloud today.
Nowadays, data centres ring up huge power bills just trying to keep the place cool. Once these slides are written to, they’re stable at room temperature and don’t need any energy to retain their data; and companies won’t need to transfer data from failing drives or tapes every few years. One small glass plate could hold the entire text of War and Peace about 875 000 times − it can store data in a fraction of the space of a data centre. Glass storage could last for hundreds or thousands of years. It does not degrade, and it’s resistant to data corruption from heat, floods or even solar flares – as long as you don’t drop it, I couldn’t help thinking.
As with all new technology, there are problems. Here it’s the costs and the speed of writing the data. Project Silica is not for you if you need to edit and modify the data. There’s still a long way to go, but as the technology matures and grows, costs are expected to drop hugely. It will be really interesting to see which way glass storage and DNA storage technologies go. Possibly there will be a hybrid solution, combining the best features of both.
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