Project Silica packs terabytes into glass

This is one of the more credible moonshots in archival storage: Microsoft is no longer just showing off a sci-fi medium, it is chipping away at the real engineering constraints that would make glass usable in datacenters.

• –The big change is borosilicate glass, which is cheaper and easier to source than the purer fused silica used in earlier demos
• –Microsoft says the new reader can work with one camera instead of three or four, a meaningful simplification if this ever becomes deployable hardware
• –The Nature paper reports 4.8 TB in a 120 mm square, 2 mm-thick glass piece, plus write speeds of 25.6 Mbit/s per beam
• –Machine-learning-based decoding is doing real work here by compensating for interference and helping recover denser 3D voxel patterns
• –If archival media can genuinely last 10,000 years without rewrite cycles, that changes the economics of cold storage for cloud providers and long-lived scientific data