Scientists develop tiny glass tablet that can store laser-etched data for 10,000 years

Microsoft has created a storage device that can keep several terabytes of data safe for nearly 10,000 years. It has been made as part of "Project Silica" and is a breakthrough in long-term data storage. The technology involves laser-modified glass storage for data, which can never be erased as it is etched into the glass with a laser. The system called Silica has been described in a paper published in the journal Nature. The system uses a tiny square of borosilica glass, roughly 0.08 inches (2 millimetres) thick, on which data is encoded by harnessing the properties of light. The thin slice of glass has been theoretically built to last for thousands of years. Unlike regular hard disks, data on this tiny glass cannot be erased. Which means, anything added to it will be available to future humanity.

Silica is made to resist all kinds of threats, such as fire, water, microwave radiation, and electromagnetic pulses. Data in Silica is recorded using differences in the phase of light wavelengths in voxels, or a three-dimensional equivalent of a pixel. The glass chip can store 4.8 terabytes of data—equivalent to about 2 million printed books or 5,000 ultra-high-definition films, according to the paper. The team took inspiration from an earlier research that experimented to check the feasibility of harnessing the physical properties of light as an extra “dimension” for data storage, Gizmodo reported.

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How laser-etched glass storage started

James Chon, an optical physicist at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, used extremely quick pulses of light to make glass material for encoding information. Peter Kazansky, an optical physicist at the University of Southampton, took the work ahead and was able to make etch Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy on glass, which was sent to space.

Microsoft took note and saw the potential to create a storage device that would be like an "archival storage technology." Richard Black, Project Silica’s research director, told Gizmodo, “We realised that if we could tame the physics and scale it, there was the potential for [laser-modified glass] to be disruptive as archival storage technology."

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How it works

To write information on the chip, an ultra-fast "femtosecond" laser etches tiny 3D shapes (called voxels) inside the glass. To read the information, a high-speed microscope is used to scan the glass, and AI algorithms translate those 3D shapes back into digital data. The glass plates need no maintenance and are a sustainable method.