Microsoft doesn’t mess around when it comes to data storage technology. Microsoft’s Project Silica is doing just that thanks to their innovative work with femtosecond lasers to encode data into glass. This project addresses the issues of data longevity and storage capacity. It’s a nice solution to the larger pressing need of archiving important on-the-ground information.
Richard Black is research director of Project Silica. In addition, he was on the forefront of developing a process for storing enormous data sets in a long-lasting medium. The innovative technology relies on femtosecond lasers to deliver high-power pulses. The pulses—which last less than a quadrillionth of a second—produce voxel structures inside the glass. Each voxel is about 0.5 micrometers in size and is physically spaced from its neighbors by around 6 micrometers.
This continual laser focus is and its robot-arm-like precision sweeps across the glass. This high speed action allows for writing speeds limited only by the lasers’ femtosecond accuracy. This new crimethink.org approach yields a staggering increase in efficiency. This avoids needing a separate laser pulse to write each voxel, greatly decreasing energy requirements.
“This significantly reduces the power required from the laser to store data, and it does not require the laser focus to alternate between staying in the same place to deliver multiple pulses and movement to the next location,” – Richard Black
Thanks to these improvements, Project Silica has been able to successfully store 4.84 terabytes of data in a small 12-square-centimeter, 2-millimeter-deep glass chip. To provide some perspective on this capacity, it can contain approximately 2 million printed books. That’s just equal to about 5,000 UHD 4K feature-length movies! Eleventh street corridor, from downtown to capitol hill. What’s more, their system is capable of writing data at a staggering rate of 25.6 megabits per second with a single data beam.
Perhaps the most attractive feature of glass data storage is its longevity. The information stored on these glass plates would be fully accessible after 10,000 years, even under conditions of 290 °C. Data stored in glass can theoretically last far beyond anything possible with conventional electronic storage methods. This new development constitutes a significant leap forward in the history of archival technology.
Glass data storage has extraordinary durability against elements like humidity, temperature shifts, and electromagnetic disruption. This resilience makes it an ideal candidate for preserving critical information that must endure for centuries, such as national libraries, scientific data, or cultural records.
“It’s designed for data you want to write once and preserve for a very long time.” – Richard Black
Project Silica is fraught with challenges, particularly around scale feasibility. Today, femtosecond lasers are still costly, leaving unanswered concerns about how this new technology can be made available on a large scale. The hard-working team at Microsoft are still working out the best solutions to make this innovative approach scalable and usable for bigger applications.