Microsoft can now store data for 10,000 years on everyday glass thanks to laser breakthrough

Breakthrough improvements to Microsoft's glass-based data-storage technology mean ordinary glassware, such as that used in cookware and oven doors, can store terabytes of data, with the information lasting 10,000 years.

The technology, which has been in development under the "Project Silica" banner since 2019, has seen steady improvements, and scientists outlined the latest innovations today (Feb. 18) in the journal Nature.

In the new study, the team showed they could encode data onto ordinary borosilicate glass — a durable, heat-resistant type of glass that's often used in glassware found in most kitchens. Previously, the scientists could only store data on pure fused silica glass, which is expensive to make and available from only a few sources. They also demonstrated several new data-encoding and data-reading techniques.

"The advance addresses key barriers to commercialization: cost and availability of storage media," study co-author Richard Black, partner research manager at Microsoft, said in a statement. "We have unlocked the science for parallel high-speed writing and developed a technique to permit accelerated aging tests on the written glass, suggesting that the data should remain intact for at least 10,000 years."

The team fitted- 4.8TB of data — equivalent to roughly 200 4K movies — onto 301 layers in a piece of glass measuring 0.08 by 4.72 inches (2 by 120 millimeters) at a writing rate of 3.13 megabytes per second (MB/s). Although that's much slower than the writing speed of hard drives (roughly 160 MB/s) or solid-state drives (roughly 7,000 MB/s), the scientists found that the data could last more than 10,000 years. Most hard drives and solid-state drives, by contrast, last up to about 10 years.

That longevity and stability are the core drivers of innovations like glass- and ceramics-based storage devices for chiefly archival reasons — rather than usage in most day-to-day devices. In theory, these alternative storage formats are much more reliable than existing formats and can serve as a long-term repository for the data we generate.

To demonstrate this idea, Microsoft scientists previously outlined plans to preserve music in the Global Music Vault in Norway. The news also follows another independent breakthrough in DNA storage, with 360TB of data capable of being held in half a mile (0.8 kilometers) of DNA.

Laser-focused on archival storage

In the study, the scientists revealed several discoveries that together resulted in more efficient and cost-effective writing and reading on glass.

First, they detailed advances in a technique called birefringent voxel writing with laser pulses. Birefringence is the phenomenon of double refraction, and voxels are the 3D equivalent of 2D pixels. The scientists developed a pseudo-single pulse — an improvement on the previous two pulses — in which one pulse can split following polarization to form the first pulse for one voxel and the second pulse for another.

This came alongside parallel writing capabilities, in which many data voxels can be written at the same time in close proximity, significantly increasing the writing speed.

The scientists also devised a new storage type in the form of "phase voxels," in which data can be encoded into the phase change — the shifting of the phase of a material via changes in energy and pressure — of the glass instead of its polarization, which occurs in the birefringent voxels. This is possible with just a single pulse, and the scientists also devised a new technique to read data held in this way.

Finally, the team found a way to identify aging data storage in voxels within the glass. They used this method alongside standard accelerated aging techniques to determine that the data could last more than 10,000 years.

In the future, the team will consider how to improve writing and reading technologies, including ways to enhance the lasers that write the data into the glass storage devices. They will also pursue different glass compositions to find the ideal material on which to store data in this format.