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Data Storage Microsoft

Is Glass the Future of Storage? (microsoft.com) 170

Posted by EditorDavid from the half-full dept.
"If we carry on the way we're going, we're going to have to concrete the whole planet just to store the data that we're generating," explains a deputy lab director at Microsoft Research Cambridge in a new video.

Fortunately, "A small sheet of glass can now hold several terabytes of data, enough to store approximately 1.75 million songs or 13 years' worth of music," explains a Microsoft Research web page about "Project Silica". (Data is retrieved by a high-speed, computer-controlled microscope from a library of glass disks storing data in three-dimensional pixels called voxels): Magnetic storage, although prevalent, is problematic. Its limited lifespan necessitates frequent re-copying, increasing energy consumption and operational costs over time. "Magnetic technology has a finite lifetime," says Ant Rowstron, Distinguished Engineer, Project Silica. "You must keep copying it over to new generations of media. A hard disk drive might last five years. A tape, well, if you're brave, it might last ten years. But once that lifetime is up, you've got to copy it over. And that, frankly, is both difficult and tremendously unsustainable if you think of all that energy and resource we're using."

Project Silica aims to break this cycle. Developed under the aegis of Microsoft Research, it can store massive amounts of data in glass plates roughly the size of a drink coaster and preserve the data for thousands of years. Richard Black, Research Director, Project Silica, adds, "This technology allows us to write data knowing it will remain unchanged and secure, which is a significant step forward in sustainable data storage." Project Silica's goal is to write data in a piece of glass and store it on a shelf until it is needed. Once written, the data inside the glass is impossible to change.

Project Silica is focused on pioneering data storage in quartz glass in partnership with the Microsoft Azure team, seeking more sustainable ways to archive data. This relationship is symbiotic, as Project Silica uses Azure AI to decode data stored in glass, making reading and writing faster and allowing more data storage... The library is passive, with no electricity in any of the storage units. The complexity is within the robots that charge as they idle inside the lab, awakening when data is needed... Initially, the laser writing process was inefficient, but after years of refinement, the team can now store several TB in a single glass plate that could last 10,000 years. For a sense of scale, each plate could store around 3,500 movies. Or enough non-stop movies to play for over half a year without repeating. A glass plate could hold the entire text of War and Peace — one of the longest novels ever written — about 875,000 times.
And most importantly, it can store data in a fraction of the space of a datacenter...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Kirschey for sharing the article.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Is Glass the Future of Storage? More

Is Glass the Future of Storage?

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  • And it's back (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14, 2023 @08:40PM (#63925665)

    It's been years since we had a good 3d storage technology that won't pan out.

    • The other half of the problem that doesn't get mentioned is where do they store the index to the data? Great, we have thousands of glass plates with exabytes of data stored on them and no way to find it. Imagine if you had hundreds of DLT tapes, or even worse, old 8-track data tapes. How are you going to know what tape has the data you need?

      This might be where the AI is brought into the picture. Maintaining the index and how the data is related to what the user is searching for is as big a problem as st

      • No different than indexing magnetic media. Or pig shit media. Or cheddar cheese media.

        The underlying physical storage mechanism has zero to do with the indexing method.

    • I remember this coming around in 1991 and Tamarak, then it popped up again. I wonder what are the real issues with holographic storage. Is it the ability to mass produce things? Life, a format that is usable? It isn't like in 30 years that the issues with this could be solved by someone.

      Even a new optical format to replace BDXL would be nice. Something that stores 1-2 TB (native) per disk at minimum, ideally more. We have mechanisms from the 1990s like 400 CD changers which could easily allow for opti

  • Write Only and needs 'AI' to decipher it? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sarusa ( 104047 ) on Saturday October 14, 2023 @08:48PM (#63925671)

    This is pretty cool for information density and physical lifetime.

    But several caveats:
          - It's write only, this is basically modern DVD-R for stuff that's *done*.
          - They don't mention write or read times times and there's probably a really good reason they don't. As described, they've got to be abysmal compared to HD or tape.
          - The most alarming thing about this is 'Azure AI is utilized to read code written in glass, turning it into usable information.' Uh.... you have a medium that can hold data for tens of thousands of years, but it can't be decoded without an AI that's going to be obsolete in 5 years, and that any theoretical people attempting to read this in 10,000 years will have no access to? Yes, this will be fine for the next 20 years, but your 10,000 year window is just out... the window.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by larwe ( 858929 )

      It's write only, this is basically modern DVD-R for stuff that's *done*.

      Without knowing facts, I surmise that the vast bulk of data storage is indeed for stuff that's "done" (Just compare the amount of video and audio data that's being recorded these days, for example). The use cases they were comparing were tapes, which are sequential archive storage media, not random-access live R/W media.

      Files you are working on change constantly. You don't need an archival quality long-term medium to work on them - you need a fast, random-access medium. You back up to slower, more shelf-sta

    • The storage is so massive, you never need to delete anything. Just design the file system accordingly.

    • You're reading into the AI thing way too much, probably. It just sounds like AI optical image recognition, literally the first useful AI application ever made. If we somehow lose that tech all that data is going to be useless to us anyway in whatever apocalypse just happened.

      • Re:Write Only and needs 'AI' to decipher it? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Sarusa ( 104047 ) on Saturday October 14, 2023 @10:52PM (#63925799)

        If it's really just binary encoding packed really tight, then anyone who can actually see it can probably just figure out what it means if they have a copy of our alphabet laying around and some Rosetta stones for English to Alienese. And then hopefully we saved some info about how to decode jpeg, png, webp, mkv, etc so if they actually cared enough they could decode pictures and video.

        I would like to think that this bullshit about using 'Azure AI' to decode it is completely unnecessary marketing bullshit just because this is Microsoft Product. But given this is MS you can't rule out something stupider unless they explicitly specify it.

    • Super long term storage is exactly for things that are, in fact, *done*. Copies of the US Constitution, music, yada yada yada. It's archiving. It doesn't matter how slow it is, only that it's stable and long term. That does mean read and write times are effectively meaningless. Just because an AI is obsolete in five years does not mean the method to encode and decode are obsolete. Pretending interaction is limited to today's Azure AI and *only* today's Azure AI is abysmally myopic. Do better.

      • plenty of unreadable files by long obsolete apps out there, you're the one that needs to face reality and do better

        • Not all data is worth saving. Most data is crap after a few years, of no value to anyone ever again.

          This whole thing about "we must save every bit of data ever created forever" is bizarre.

          Frankly, most data is extremely transient and no longer useful after a few weeks, at most. The data created by some obsolete app is even less valuable or someone would have copied it to a newer format. (Insert edge case response _here_).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by larwe ( 858929 )

            most data is extremely transient and no longer useful after a few weeks

            Legal data retention requirements for many types of business and other activities would argue with this. Many of the records I deal with must be archived for a mandatory multiple-decade period.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
            The thing is, today we have no idea of what the future will find valuable, look at the lost DR who episodes, or other things that has been recorded over because the tape needed to be re used or archival space was at a premium. Shore I could find better examples but this one was what fist popped into my head. There is ofc another challenge with long term archiving (I'm talking decades or centuries) Ensuring that these ultra durable mediums can be read and that the data on them can be decoded

            • TV shows take up a trivial amount of space, unworthy of developing a new technology but sure we should save that stuff. No problem. That's easy.

              We create ridiculous mounds of new data every day and data about that data and data about the data about the data. That no one will ever look at again.

              I've worked at two companies that stored bulk customer data for extended periods of time. One was random users back in the day, so I had to deal with creating a mass storage system on a petabyte level at a time whe

          • Not all data is worth saving. Most data is crap after a few years, of no value to anyone ever again.

            This whole thing about "we must save every bit of data ever created forever" is bizarre.

            Frankly, most data is extremely transient and no longer useful after a few weeks, at most. The data created by some obsolete app is even less valuable or someone would have copied it to a newer format. (Insert edge case response _here_).

            Nice Strawman ya got there, Bucko!

            • It isn't a straw man. It's true. If the data from an obsolete app had value, someone would have done something with it. Will 100% of it be saved? No, of course not, duh, but you tell me what's an example of some valuable data left behind on some obsolete app that we need so badly today that we should invent a zillion dollar glass storage mechanism for it?

        • plenty of unreadable files by long obsolete apps out there, you're the one that needs to face reality and do better

          Exactly.

          For example, It is a full-time and continuous job at the Library of Congress to keep moving their Digitally-Stored Information "forward" to the latest Storage Methods du jour.

          Now, multiply that by a Planet-full of similar Archives. . .

          It's a serious challenge, and one that isn't going away anytime soon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      wild guess is that encoding algorithms allow for much higher density than the actual resolution of the instrument allows. all is good if that algorithm can be flashed and run on a time resistant device. if human tech is really lost to that extent at some point then that glass would not be more inaccessible than any old usb stick.

      then again 10.000 years is just the potential. it is unreasonable to think that we will not find even better permanent storage in that timeframe many times over (if we don't go exti

    • This is pretty cool for information density and physical lifetime.

      But several caveats:

      - It's write only, this is basically modern DVD-R for stuff that's *done*.

      - They don't mention write or read times times and there's probably a really good reason they don't. As described, they've got to be abysmal compared to HD or tape.

      - The most alarming thing about this is 'Azure AI is utilized to read code written in glass, turning it into usable information.' Uh.... you have a medium that can hold data for tens of thousands of years, but it can't be decoded without an AI that's going to be obsolete in 5 years, and that any theoretical people attempting to read this in 10,000 years will have no access to? Yes, this will be fine for the next 20 years, but your 10,000 year window is just out... the window.

      Exactly.

      Just like archiving your personal records, family photos, etc. on "1,000 year" M-Disc media.

      The data may last for 1,000 years; but in 50 years, there won't be a working drive mechanism left to read it.

  • Magnetic ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by HBI ( 10338492 ) on Saturday October 14, 2023 @08:52PM (#63925673)

    I have DC2000 tapes from 1990 or so that are completely readable today, and I haven't been overly kind to them.

    Same for a lot of 5.25" floppies. Hell, same for hard drives, though head crashes and stepper motor failures, also loss of lubrication are an issue there.

    • Re:Magnetic ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by larwe ( 858929 ) on Saturday October 14, 2023 @09:01PM (#63925685)
      Very much this. I have floppy disks of all the four relatively popular sizes (8", 5.25", 3.5" and 3" [Spectrum/Amstrad]), many of which are still fully readable even from the late 70s - the ones that have failed are the ones that weren't stored in a climate-controlled environment and hence developed mold and other issues. For hard disks, it can be hit or miss, but it's not unusual to recover most or all of the data off, say, a ST-225 from the mid-to-late 80s, especially if you're willing to do some work. And, again if it's been stored in a climate controlled environment, QIC tapes from 40 years ago are _usually_ readable, it's the rule not the exception. Though, you probably only want to read them once, save the data, and never run that tape past a head again. The thing is, though, none of that is guaranteed.

    • Same for a lot of 5.25" floppies.

      How though? Unless that 5.25" floppy was written recently it would very likely be unreadable. Most are. I have 5.25" floppies and drives laying around, all of them useless. 3.5" as well. They weren't a very reliable medium back when they were popular either.

      Who else has fond memories of going through 3 hours of Windows 95 setup only to get a CRC error on the 12th floppy?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        You're probably thinking of 1.2 MB 5.25" floppies, which came out with the PC/AT and which borrows its format from 8" disks (just with 80 tracks instead of 77) which is why it also has a different rotation speed and data transfer rate. You're right, most people consider those unreliable although I personally never had too much problem with them. But everything prior to that, and everything not-PC-compatible, uses much more reliable double density disks. These should just keep working, provided they don't ph

        • But everything prior to that, and everything not-PC-compatible, uses much more reliable double density disks. These should just keep working,

          Everything should just keep working except Amiga. Their trackless formats depend on a perfectly working and aligned drive, ugh. Lost so much data on Amiga floppy.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

            I meant specifically 5.25" disks -- weren't Amigas all 3.5", at least for internal drives?

            360K disks written on a 360K drive, then overwritten on a 1.2 MB drive were another reason people ran into trouble. The high density drives didn't do two passes to erase and rewrite, they just wrote to effectively half the track. If you started with a truly blank disk, you could get away with this, but by and large it was just not a great idea to write to 360K floppies in a 1.2 MB drive.

            • Yeah, you could buy an external 5.25" of some description for the Amiga, I think it was a 1.2MB intended for use with their PC emulators, but otherwise they were all 3.5". DSDD formatted to 880kB and DSHD (in later models) to IIRC 1.76MB or similar.

          • But everything prior to that, and everything not-PC-compatible, uses much more reliable double density disks. These should just keep working,

            Everything should just keep working except Amiga. Their trackless formats depend on a perfectly working and aligned drive, ugh. Lost so much data on Amiga floppy.

            Trackless?!?

            How the F did THAT work??? (obviously, not very well). But seriously: WTF were they thinking?!?!?

            Surely, you must just be referring to "Soft-Sectored" floppies, right?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HBI ( 10338492 )

        I paid for a couple of refurb drives off ebay. Some dude cleaned them and fixed them up, more professionally than I would. They rock.

        It is true that 90% of my disks are 360k.

        My view is inop drives are a huge bite of the problem. Even just cleaning the heads helps.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      You are lucky then. A lot of floppy disks from that era are rotting now. They also delaminate and can be damaged by head crashes.

      Tape tends to be better, mostly because it was manufactured to a higher standard for corporate users who were not price sensitive. Even so, it can stretch and rot too. Because it is a mechanical device, the plastic parts can become brittle and fail, and the tape can get damaged by bad drives.

      Most drives from the 80s are either dead or dying now. Some have rubber parts that deterio

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HBI ( 10338492 )

        As I said in another thread, I had someone refurb a couple drives for me better than I would have and they work like a charm. Head alignment, lube, belts, head cleaning, verify rotational speed, working sensors...all issues. In 10 years i'll consider having it done again, if i'm still here and it's possible. My successful read rate is very high. Hell successful writes to very old 'technically new' media have also been good.

        Now, when I rebuild an old 5150/5160/5170, I put usb floppies and industrial flas

  • With several hard drives, including the infamous IBM "deathstar" using it for the platters.

  • Full life archiving is coming (Score:3)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Saturday October 14, 2023 @09:03PM (#63925687)

    Imagine wearing a HD 3D bodycam and stereo mic, and docking it each night as you sleep. Each day's recording etched into a new track in the glass until the disk is full, then you load a new disk. Presumably with the content AI-tagged for indexing.

    Your whole life in just a few glass coasters. Or at least the parts you don't turn the device off for. Look back and review anything and everything.

    It's both awesome and terrible.

    • Re:Full life archiving is coming (Score:4, Insightful)

      by HBI ( 10338492 ) on Saturday October 14, 2023 @09:11PM (#63925705)

      ffs. I have text chat logs of when I met my ex-wife in 2007. Even reading that shit is painful now, watching my dysfunction (and hers). Cringeworthy.

      It seems so dumb to want your life to be under the microscope like that. It's meant to be lived, not to be reviewed.

      • "Where'd I leave my keys?"

      • It seems so dumb to want your life to be under the microscope like that. It's meant to be lived, not to be reviewed.

        It was this review that determined that moment was not worth recording. You never know when your life can be either significant personally and/or of historical significance. All anyone can really hope for is that the event of significance was witnessed / recorded.

        Your post seems almost nihilistic in it's desire for your life to be un-noteworthy.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HBI ( 10338492 )

          It was a bad experience and i'm nothing special. I'm never going to conquer the world or win a Nobel or anything like that. Or hopefully do anything that would earn infamy. Just hopefully do as little harm as possible on my way out. If that sounds nihilistic, so be it. I've already reproduced and they launched, I did my duty.

    • Re:Full life archiving is coming (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Hoi Polloi ( 522990 ) on Saturday October 14, 2023 @09:11PM (#63925709) Journal

      You'd have a massive amount of junk data. It is like parents who take a million photos of their kids. No one is ever going to look at all those photos. Probably only 50-100 are worth saving.

      • AI can look through it though .. and bring up the worst shit at the most inopportune time. It can be used to piece together almost any narrative about you. For example, they can find the 12 instance where you got angry about something and put those together to say you're hotheaded. Find the instances where you forgot something and they can say you're forgetful.

    • Something similar was done in the movie The Final Cut. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]

    • Imagine wearing a HD 3D bodycam and stereo mic, and docking it each night as you sleep. Each day's recording etched into a new track in the glass until the disk is full, then you load a new disk. Presumably with the content AI-tagged for indexing.

      Your whole life in just a few glass coasters. Or at least the parts you don't turn the device off for. Look back and review anything and everything.

      It's both awesome and terrible.

      Ick.

      Shades of that Robin Williams 2004 movie The Final Cut:

      https://m.imdb.com/title/tt036... [imdb.com]

  • Maybe but only for archiving (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lando242 ( 1322757 ) on Saturday October 14, 2023 @09:05PM (#63925689)
    >A hard disk drive might last five years. A tape, well, if you're brave, it might last ten years.

    Seeing as I have a ton of 5¼ floppies that are in the 40 year old range and some tapes that are even older, well, I don't know what this guy is on but its the good stuff. Heck, I have some bootleg Apple ][ games that I know for a fact are copies of copies of copies and they still work. When i finally ditched VHS 15 years ago I had several tapes from the early 80s that were fine too.

    At work I have a number of client's still using machines with magnetic hard drives that are in the 10 years old range. These are machines that see daily use and have power on times in the tens of thousands of hours. I'm sure the users of these machines would love for them to die due to their sluggishness. I know we want them gone because they are a bear to work on. But you tell some managers to replace something that isn't explicitly broken and they start clutching their pearls.

    Besides, they are writable media. This guy is talking about unwriteable media. It isn't a fair comparison.

  • We need to do what our brains do and not try to store everything. Not everything is worth storing. There is also the matter of organizing it. Massive amounts of data with no way to search it and correlate it isn't useful. You don't want to save the 50 photos of something where you were trying to get a single good shot. Toss the junk.

  • wasn't CD supposed to last 100 years? (Score:3)

    by kiviQr ( 3443687 ) on Saturday October 14, 2023 @09:14PM (#63925715)
    "preserve the data for thousands of years" ... probably in dog years

  • Uh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Saturday October 14, 2023 @09:43PM (#63925749)

    There goes privacy and nothing is forgotten. Shit you did or said 20 years ago in a different context and cultural norm can be brought up and replayed like you done it yesterday. 1984, every year. Think of it like if the world goes vegan in 10 years, then someone can play back videos of you eating meat and show how disgusting you were.

    • That's a culture issue, not a storage issue. People shouldn't be embarrassed (themselves or by others) over having done stupid stuff in the past, everyone does that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Yes along with a million videos of other people doing exactly the same, showing that while it will be totally discussing to do it at that point, and who knows maybe even ilegal, It was tattily normal and acceptable to do it at the time you did it (ie now). And if they are studid enugh not to understand that context matters fuck em

    • If that's going to happen, that's already happening now--we can already copy data from medium to medium. I have backups that are 20 years old. I haven't looked at them in ages, but they're there. But an archival glass copy of you being a dipshit in your teens online is unlikely to make the cut.

      I want something like this so I can get a high quality version of a movie and keep it forever and not have to upgrade from VHS to DVD to BluRay. I'd like to see the government archive more official media and images of

  • In several TB? Why would you ever bother archiving such low quality versions? That's less than 1GB/movie. Well below DVD quality. The kind of movies I've got spindles full of CD-Rs of from the early 00s that I don't even bother with because the quality is trash. I'd hope we'd archive the masters, which you'd get 1-2 per plate, and consumers much better than YIFY rips at least.

    But who knows, at the rate we're going... Damn streaming services are going to be all that's left. And they keep cutting bit rates

    • Don't worry too much about Disney. Their streaming service is a failure. Attendance is way down at the theme parks. And their movies aren't the big hits they used to automatically be; some even lose money.

      They're not exactly a field leader. Someone will buy them, kill Disney+ and show the old films properly again.

      Han shot first.

  • LSSN- Local Space Storage Network.

  • >"A small sheet of glass can now hold several terabytes of data, enough to store approximately 1.75 million songs or 13 years' worth of music," " For a sense of scale, each plate could store around 3,500 movies. Or enough non-stop movies to play for over half a year without repeating. A glass plate could hold the entire text of War and Peace â" one of the longest novels ever written â" about 875,000 times."

    Really, I think we all know how much data a terabyte is. Besides, they forgot the manda

    • I guess terabyte is too close to SI units and cannot be used. I find it a bit funny that in a country that refuses to convert to everyday SI unit usage, often arguing that the imperial system units are so much easier to relate to (to those who have used it their entire lifetime) people so often resorts to these makeshift units. I don't know if it is just an editor thing, though.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by znrt ( 2424692 )

        people so often resorts to these makeshift units. I don't know if it is just an editor thing, though.

        they aren't units (i.e. for measure), they are metaphors to convey scale because some (most?) people has difficulty dealing with actual units and conversions, or with numbers in the first place. so, yes, it's a communicator thing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      how small is small are viu talking a mm^2 or a cm`2 and how thick is the glass?

      • >"how small is small are viu talking a mm^2 or a cm`2 and how thick is the glass?"

        Don't know.

        But not sure it maters all that much. Just a general comparison of two 4TB M.2 SSD's looks about the size/thickness of a "coaster" (their example), so 8TB of extremely fast, static, random-access storage that works with anything and is comparatively quite cheap. That is about 4 times the storage density of just 4 years ago, for the same price.

        Will it last hundreds of years? No. But is that really needed? I t

  • Nothing new (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Saturday October 14, 2023 @11:07PM (#63925813)

    They've been talking about using crystalline glass for storage for 30 years at this point, and scientists have been able to do almost exactly as described in this paper since about... man, 1996 or so, I think?

    I remember reading about it in PC Magazine or Popular Mechanics about that time: 1TB+ of storage in a thin piece of crystal/glass the size of a postage stamp. I vaguely recall it talking about how it could be made read-only in the fashion described here, but that they'd also be able to use electrical state to effectively do what SSDs do today not long from then, on glass.

    So why republish something that's been doable for decades?

  • Throw it away after a time (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday October 14, 2023 @11:32PM (#63925839)

    Seriously. The obsession with storing everything is just insane. It has no use because most of it will never even get accessed again.

    • >"Seriously. The obsession with storing everything is just insane. It has no use because most of it will never even get accessed again."

      Even worse, it has the effect of eroding freedom and privacy. If everything you do is stored, it is way too easy to cancel someone or trap him through fishing. It also makes it easier to decode who everyone is, meaning total lack of anonymity. People can change, and sometimes it is necessary to have an opportunity for a fresh start. That starts to become impossible.

      F

    • We lose really important parts of our history when we do that. How much of history is from recovered letters between collaborators/friends/lovers? We know about how math and physics theorems evolved over time because of the authors writing them down and stuff the papers in a box somewhere. Darwin's notes. All that stuff.

      Most of the crap we generate personally is useless, but not all of it is, and it would be nice to archive some of it. And when it comes to governments and big companies, we need more archivi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        That is BS. Things like open access publications and the like already get archived. Email cannot even be legally archived in the EU, for example, because the GDPR forbids it. I seriously doubt anything of value would be lost.

  • This is a threat to our Ministries of Truth (Minitrues). Read only history cannot be revised to bring it into line with what our Minitrues have deemed is correct & is therefore a danger to civil stability. How else can we say that Putin bombing civilians & cutting off their food, electricity, & water is a war crime & then cheer on the Israeli military while they do the same thing? Doublethink isn't possible with immutable, unchangeable history, so any such read-only storage medium must be ig

  • Glass resiliency (Score:3)

    by Equuleus42 ( 723 ) on Sunday October 15, 2023 @12:13AM (#63925875) Homepage

    <sarcasm>It's a good thing that glass doesn't break when dropped...</sarcasm>

  • So the answer is, no.
    • I'd have been willing to overlook the question mark in the title if the author had given us the data storage capacity of a single glass plate in units of imperial standard bananas.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday October 15, 2023 @12:30AM (#63925897)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I was born 10 days ago.
    A full-grown man, born 10 days ago.

    I woke on a street of this city.
    I don't know who I am,
    or where I've been,
    or where I'm going.

    Someone wiped my memories clean,
    and they tracked me down and tried to kill me.
    I ran. I managed to escape them the first time.

    Then the hand, my hand.
    Told me what to do.

    Demon With The Glass Hand [youtube.com]

  • The future is "memory diamond" (Score:3)

    by mkwan ( 2589113 ) on Sunday October 15, 2023 @02:03AM (#63925977)

    Popularized, and possibly invented by, Charlie Stross, you make a diamond using carbon-12 and -13 atoms to encode your data.

    Incredible storage density, and very stable.

  • HD last waaaay longer than 5 years if you are not rewriting the whole hard drive ever week or even day. I suspect most users are not.

    • Yes, but they are still subject to random failures in a way that a glass platter is not. Short of mechanical damage, I don't see a quartz disc failing for any of the reasons you might lose data from an HDD or SSD.

      Even a typical house fire would be a few hundred degrees too cold to melt it, so as long as the disc was in an enclosure to prevent it from being shattered by bits of the burning home falling on it, you're good.

  • Wavy glass (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pandaman9000 ( 520981 )

    Honest question-
    Glass that is old enough looks wavy. This is because it settles. Is this a different glass, or could the glass distort to the point that the data is irretrievable?
    I was told long ago that glass has characteristics like a fluid. An extremely slow to move fluid, but a fluid nonetheless.
    I followed protocol on this one, and did not read the article one bit :-)

    • Re:Wavy glass (Score:5, Informative)

      by mikechant ( 729173 ) on Sunday October 15, 2023 @11:51AM (#63926623)

      I was told long ago that glass has characteristics like a fluid. An extremely slow to move fluid, but a fluid nonetheless.

      A myth. Total bollocks, based on old glass windows being thicker at the bottom leading to the assumption it "flowed down" over time. Actually due to that glass being irregular when made so they deliberately placed the "heavy end" at the bottom.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by cwatts ( 622605 )

      Glass doesn't settle, thats a myth. The waviness is an artifact of manufacturing.

      "Contrary to the urban legend that glass is a slow-moving liquid, it's actually a highly resilient elastic solid, which means that it is completely stable. So those ripples, warps, and bull's eye indentations you see in really old pieces of glass "were created when the glass was created" Cima says. They are the result of old-fashioned glass fabrication methods, not aging. "

      https://engineering.mit.edu/en... [mit.edu]â%20Cima%20says.

      c

  • I can't tell whether these remind me more of the "tapes" in ST:TOS or the modules Bowman removed from HAL in 2001.

    Maybe it's more like the memory crystals they used in Babylon 5.

  • it can store massive amounts of data in glass plates roughly the size of a drink coaster and preserve the data for thousands of years.

    That sounds exactly like the Storage Media used by the Atavachron on the planet Sarpeidon:

    https://www.therpf.com/forums/... [therpf.com]

  • Can't they just write how many terabytes a coaster sized glass disc can hold, with today's technology.

    A movie can be as small as 700MB or as big as 100GB, depending on quality, and x number of movies will get a huge disparity in storage capability.

    I loath people who dumb news down so much it stop saying anything of value.

  • We all do it, things we don't delete because maybe one day it might be useful. Archive important things and let the junk go!
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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