hard drives as large as your washing machine may soon become obsolete due to a recent breakthrough in what Microsoft refers to as “Project Silica.” The objective of Project Silica isn’t solely to develop a storage unit that surpasses the world’s largest SSD in capacity and speed, but rather to create a medium capable of storing data semi-indefinitely along with an encoding method.
Microsoft states that borosilicate glass is the optimal material since it is “a permanent data storage medium that is impervious to water, heat, and dust.” The company recently shared its latest discoveries in Nature and announced that it inscribed information into the glass at a microscopic scale utilizing lasers that fired so quickly they could only be timed in femtoseconds (one quadrillionth of a second). The report claims Microsoft successfully stored a total of 4.8 TB of data on a 120 mm square piece of borosilicate glass that measured 2 mm in thickness.
Additionally, the laser purportedly recorded data at a rate of 25.6 Mbit s-1 per beam, encoding them into the borosilicate as 3D voxels. When researchers simulated aging of the glass, they estimated that the data on this storage unit would remain readable for as long as 10,000 years. In contrast, although hard drive platters typically range from 63.5 to 88.9 mm in width, they usually store only 1 or 2GB and have a lifespan of around 20 years in storage — just five years with regular use.