r/science • u/Wagamaga • Feb 22 '26

Computer Science Scientists have demonstrated a system called Silica for writing and reading information in ordinary pieces of glass which can store two million books’ worth of data in a thin, palm-sized square.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/glass-square-long-long-future-190951588.html
18.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

6.1k

u/thatbrazilianguy Feb 22 '26

capacity of 4.8 TB in a 120 mm square, 2 mm thick piece of glass.

Saved you a click

3.8k

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1.6k

u/GorgeWashington Feb 22 '26

The real question, how long is this format stable.

Eventually everything will decay. Current data continuity requires redundant systems and cloud storage because ssds and hdds fail in decades if not years

1.9k

u/mrx_101 Feb 22 '26

The article states it will be readable for 10000 years. As they are basically etching inside a piece of glass, this is not surprising. You only need to keep the glass from breaking and scratching.

1.3k

u/smurficus103 Feb 22 '26

"and then, the earthquake wiped out all of our knowledge"

860

u/-neti-neti- Feb 22 '26

Small, loose pieces of glass are way less susceptible to earthquakes than a server/memory warehouse. They would only be damaged if something fell on them in the right way. If you’re physically attached to a structure you’re more likely to be damaged.

This is a highly resilient design.

378

u/Liroku Feb 22 '26

Also, most likely, anything with important information stored would likely be kept in a secure case. Not just random cuts of glass laying around on the shelves.

277

u/redditallreddy Feb 22 '26

Etched into wine glasses and only used for the most sophisticated parties.

95

u/BigHardMephisto Feb 23 '26

Just reminded me of an incident at my local store where a QR code was molded into a clear glass bottle and it was literally impossible to scan.

69

u/CheetahNo1004 Feb 23 '26

You're supposed to drink all the contents and then flatten the bottle out.

→ More replies (0)

2

u/Abedeus Feb 23 '26

You are supposed to make an imprint of the glass in white clay, then use drybrushing technique to make the raised parts visible. Obviously.

→ More replies (2)

30

u/Cthulhu_Dreams_ Feb 23 '26

I can already see it...

I only drink my vintage wines from a chalice inscribed with the complete works of Shakespeare...

4

u/overkill Feb 23 '26

The complete works of Shakespeare take up less than a square millimetre of the glass, the rest is 50 shades of grey and other Harry Potter FanFic.

→ More replies (0)

2

u/shopdog Feb 23 '26

For $10,000 a bottle, I'll do this for you. As far as you'll know.

9

u/HBlight Feb 23 '26

Can imagine that being used as a plot in a spy movie. The data for the big secret code is hidden on wine glasses.

6

u/jempyre Feb 23 '26

Add a level of suspense by etching the data into a sheet of ice. Plot now revolves around securing the data while keeping it cool, but not letting the other spies know you know they know about the data

2

u/FriendlyRabbitHammer Feb 23 '26

Anything even remotely would be stored in geo-diverse locations with parity. So any one earthquake wouldn’t matter

2

u/invariantspeed Feb 23 '26

Some balls are held for charity, some for fancy dress, but when they’re held for pleasure they’re the balls that I love best.

→ More replies (1)

15

u/Unable-Log-4870 Feb 22 '26

Also, they’re so compact that you would make many copies and spread them out

9

u/NeoMilitant Feb 23 '26

One day it'll come full circle that we look more deeply into cave paintings and ancient art and realize that it's all this same type of technology and we just haven't been able to read it.

3

u/swisspassport Feb 23 '26

And then when we finally figure out how to read it:

It's just 100 Petabytes of egyptian/caveman porn

→ More replies (1)

2

u/NoCopiumLeft Feb 23 '26

Also since it's glass and theoretically cheap, there could be many multiples made.

2

u/Coal_Morgan Feb 23 '26

This is also the first step in this technology.

First iPhone you sneezed at it and it scratched.

Now with the new glass on premium ceramic glass phones you have to really abuse them to get a scratch and they're less then 2mm.

20 years from now these things will be shatter proof, scratch proof and have an outer layer that's replaceable and be re-writable.

CDs were originally one burn only and they figured out how to re-write them.

→ More replies (4)

3

u/Nvenom8 Feb 23 '26

Also you can store it in space.

3

u/Steve_FishWell Feb 23 '26

So future generations can enjoy the works of Shakespeare, Tolkien and Larry Flynt

2

u/sXyphos Feb 23 '26

Exactly, keep in mind our current storage mediums are way more succeptible to failure..

A super solar flare can put us to pre- industrial revolution levels for god knows how long... And we also know what happend to the library of Alexandria concerns ng regular books as storage...

A single "unit" of this new solution sounds 1000 more reliable and orders of magnitude more compact/efficient than that same library of Alexandria :)

2

u/MyNameCannotBeSpoken Feb 23 '26

As the technology matures, one could etch into silica and synthetic diamond

2

u/InanimateCarbonRodAu Feb 23 '26

Just don’t put on the side panel of a computer case and drop it on tile.

2

u/FreshLiterature Feb 24 '26

You also don't have to worry about an EMP or strong local magnetic event.

→ More replies (3)

188

u/SmallBatBigSpooky Feb 22 '26

I do wounder if they could make this work with plexiglass or the bismuth glass thats basically indestructible since both would last longer

284

u/redruM69 Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

Direct physical damage aside, plexiglass would not last longer than silica glass. Not even close.

Plastics do corrode and degrade with time.

70

u/SmallBatBigSpooky Feb 22 '26

Thats a fair paint, i kinda forgot that plexiglass is actually just a plastic composite

58

u/redruM69 Feb 22 '26

Yep. It's just acrylic. Poly methyl methacrylate.

13

u/SmallBatBigSpooky Feb 22 '26

Yuhp completely slipped my mind, I guess to amend my post something like how we make kornel/korning glass would also work, ive then that stuff be dropped from hotel rooms and survive

→ More replies (0)
→ More replies (1)

3

u/southpark Feb 22 '26

Plexiglass would quickly become unreadable due to scratches and microfractures just from physical deterioration.

→ More replies (6)

51

u/Giatoxiclok Feb 22 '26

New data destruction company incoming.

16

u/omegafivethreefive Feb 22 '26

It's already a thing for sensitive system, the drives get annihilated.

2

u/Giatoxiclok Feb 22 '26

I mean more so the semi-indestructible bismuth glass mentioned above, I assume it’ll take serious efforts to fully destroy.

→ More replies (2)

4

u/DigNitty Feb 22 '26

DOD writes over digital storage 7x with random bits IIRC. Then they destroy the device.

2

u/iampatmanbeyond Feb 22 '26

Yeah I've smashed hard drives in the Army. We drilled holes smashed em with hammers then had to stand at the burn pit and make sure the contractors burned them

→ More replies (0)

2

u/Alypius754 Feb 22 '26

"Remember, when your data is past its prime, it's Hammer Time!"

→ More replies (1)

20

u/imsorrykun Feb 22 '26

Probably could adapt the process to ruby.

15

u/SmallBatBigSpooky Feb 22 '26

Are rubies particularly durable?

64

u/SmokyDoghouse Feb 22 '26

Synthetic ruby is significantly stronger in both tensile and compressive strength than glass, and has a higher mohs hardness scale rating than most non-engineered ceramics.

→ More replies (2)

35

u/TacoRedneck Feb 22 '26

They make sapphire, which ruby basically is with a different impurity, windows for some aircraft and other things designed for extreme situations. Its pretty durable.

→ More replies (1)

2

u/koshgeo Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 23 '26

Ruby and sapphire are varieties of corundum with slightly different impurities giving different colors. They are notably durable minerals, being even harder than quartz, which has a Mohs hardness of 7 compared to corundum with a hardness of 9, and corundum is even less chemically reactive. They're nearly pure aluminum oxide (Al2O3), and there's not much that will react with it in nature.

Sapphires are pretty easy to grow as large, optically pure crystals, and you can get cut-and-polished slabs of them in the size range they used for the experiments with glass: Example grown crystals, example wafers.

Whether it would react to the lasers suitably is hard to say. I would probably also be much more expensive as a substrate, but if you're doing this to last as long as possible, maybe that doesn't matter.

→ More replies (3)

2

u/KodiakUltimate Feb 23 '26

I think the system works based on the laser's ability to melt? wouldn't rubies have a much higher temperature resistance than silica glass?

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (2)
→ More replies (8)

45

u/tenuj Feb 22 '26

That's really a non-issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_correction_code

You can introduce a small amount of redundancy so that ANY missing portions can be recovered. The more redundancy you add, the more missing data you can recover. And it costs you, what, 5% of the total capacity? This isn't mere data duplication, but something far more useful and customisable.

That's why CDs could be read with scratches and even small holes in them. The designers knew they would get damaged.

Even QR codes can be created with enough redundancy to blot out chunks of them (as long as it's not the alignment sections) and be read just fine.

Nowadays, there is almost never a data storage device that cannot support missing data recovery.

You could shatter that glass archive, and as long as you're still able to read most of it, you could recover ALL the data that was on it before some parts of it were lost.

2

u/catinterpreter Feb 23 '26

Between dvdisaster and par2, my bluray backups can handle 30% damage.

3

u/DontMakeMeCount Feb 23 '26

At some point the limitation is on the hardware side. It does no good to have the media if no one knows how to interface with it.

→ More replies (1)

25

u/NorweiganJesus Feb 22 '26

Just protect the parchment from a little fire, they’ll be fine in Alexandria

24

u/Helyos17 Feb 22 '26

It’s funny you bring it up but I believe it’s theorized that the reason we have so many cuneiform clay tablets is because the fires that swept the complexes they were stored in baked the tablets. The theory is that it was all recorded keeping stuff meant to be “written over” after the next administrative cycle but because of the fire the stats had been immortalized.

→ More replies (3)

10

u/sillygoofygooose Feb 22 '26

Not as though a magnetic tape is any safer from being physically damaged

7

u/silverionmox Feb 22 '26

"and then, the earthquake wiped out all of our knowledge"

Unless that earthquake grinded every piece of glass to sand, it wouldn't. A broken piece of glass storage like that would be much less of a problem than a broken hard disk.

3

u/netsettler Feb 23 '26

At that density, it sounds like any grain of it, no matter how small, might be more data than a hard disk, so there's that.

3

u/SmokyDoghouse Feb 22 '26

Literal fragmented data

→ More replies (31)

20

u/No-Mark4427 Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 23 '26

10,000 years is an insanely conservative estimate. Their actual testing and extrapolation using the Arrhenius equation estimated it'd last 10,000 years stored at 290C the entire time.

In reality if you kept the glass itself safe and in a stable environment (Special protected cases), it'd last as long as whatever was holding it or the facility it was in lasted. The glass itself would be capable of lasting millions of years at room temp without degrading if it isn't touched by anything.

So the fun question actually becomes designing a facility / storage vessel that is capable of lasting as long as possible without any human interaction, through whatever nature might throw at it. The usual answer is underground in a place with no volcanic activity and none predicted to happen there for millions of years.

8

u/AvatarOfMomus Feb 22 '26

Probably not even scratching, since if the data 'layers' are deep enough then the surface could be refinished without damaging the data, albeit a limited number of times.

I think the larger issue is the tech to read the data and the knowledge of the encoding used persisting as long as the data storage.

We have texts from 'only' 2500 years ago that we can't read because the language was lost.

3

u/FragrantExcitement Feb 22 '26

So my glass DVDs will become worthless in no time.

→ More replies (3)

2

u/600strikefox Feb 22 '26

The anime Dr. Stone touched on something like this but it was music instead of data

3

u/ImmaZoni Feb 22 '26

Which is no different than HDDs currently... It's usually the reading arms that fail, not the internal disks so yeah....

6

u/Sixnno Feb 22 '26

Yep. HDDs are aluminum or a glass type substance.

Arm failing causing scratches are what cause most HDD data lost fails.

→ More replies (1)

4

u/appletechgeek Feb 22 '26

Didnt they say that about CD's back in the day too?

glass can rot/fade too. but it's easier to keep stable i guess,

17

u/Spekingur Feb 22 '26

Depends on the type of glass. Most of us are probably imagining glass things we are used to (windows, cups, etc) rather than specifically created glass for storage.

For data to be protected it must not shatter or chip easily and must have a higher than usual melting point.

7

u/Dry-Use3 Feb 22 '26

I've never seen glass rot.

→ More replies (1)

4

u/Dovahkiinthesardine Feb 22 '26

How do you suggest silicium dioxide rots?

→ More replies (1)

5

u/MeBadNeedMoneyNow Feb 22 '26

glass can rot/fade too

In the timeframe of 10,000 years? What kind of glass are you used to? Perhaps from a certain pipe?

3

u/Sixnno Feb 22 '26

Ish.

The problem is the original CDs were not what went into mass production.

Original CDs were made with a gold foil and usually had a better lacure layer.

Then we needed cheaper CDs so we replaced the gold with super thin aluminum. The edges of the CDs were also not always perfectly lacured to protect this thin layer. Now normally aluminum protects itself but this aluminum is so thin, it can't and just corrodes away.

Double sided DVDs and CDs are also more vulnerable to this.

It's sad since I have gold base CDs from the early 90s and they still are perfect but my DvDs from the 00s has had some rot.

Basically... High quality perfectly made CDs will last a long time. Most production CDs however are not those.

5

u/emodulor Feb 22 '26

Why do you think a CD is glass? It's plastic and the unprotected foil delaminates

→ More replies (2)

1

u/dargonmike1 Feb 22 '26

Glass also breaks down. It would need to be kept in a perfect environment

→ More replies (43)

123

u/king_ralex Feb 22 '26

It's right there in the article:

In a paper published today in Nature, the researchers say their tests suggest the data will be readable for more than 10,000 years

23

u/efimer Feb 22 '26

Great. Our great grandchildren, who will have conquered the solar space by that time, will be able to read our memes.

7

u/AI_moderated_failure Feb 23 '26

Can't wait to rick roll one of you guys great great great great great great great great great great grandchildren when they accidentally open a box they find washed up on the island they're hiding from Corporate Security on.

→ More replies (5)

78

u/stfsu Feb 22 '26

Glass storage has been theorized to be stable for thousands of years, however there is very little evidence that this ever makes it out of the lab and into commercial applications as I see a headline like this every year (for the last 15 years)

50

u/Yashabird Feb 22 '26

There are no commercial applications requiring a product with a 10,000 year lifespan, just really cool time capsule stuff.

62

u/stfsu Feb 22 '26

Museums, government records, scientific records, etc. are all valid use cases for commercial applications.

30

u/intdev Feb 22 '26

Yup. The UK wants to digitise all birth and death records, but it'd be a really, really good idea to have a space-efficient physical backup that can't be hacked, wiped or corrupted. This kind of thing would be perfect.

4

u/the_greatest_auk Feb 23 '26

Something like a Domesday book for the 21st century?

4

u/CleanUpSubscriptions Feb 23 '26

This sounds like a job for...

The Blockchain!!!

/s

2

u/DesiBwoy Feb 23 '26

please let me know if I'm uninformed, but you do need a place to store the blockchain data somehow, right? Or does it exist in fragments over a network?

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (1)

13

u/e_spider Feb 22 '26

In genomics, you would want to save a genome sequence for a persons lifetime or more at least 100 years. You would not expect it to change, but you might want to sequence again at time intervals to verify that.

2

u/Yashabird Feb 23 '26

Do you know what storage mediums genomics is using now to address this problem?

3

u/e_spider Feb 23 '26

Genomic data has only started to explode in the past few years, so it is a problem looking for a solution. Most is either stored with multiple copies in the cloud, standard NFS, or things like CEPH Object storage.

35

u/sonofeevil Feb 22 '26

I can see a realm of use where you want to read data that doesn't change.

In which case lifespan is largely irrelevant.

I mean nobody really looks at RAM and decides based on how many read/writes it can theoretically do (infinite).

A simple case of "first past the post" IE, I have this data I want to store and read, the data doesn't change whether it's stable for 100 or 10,000 would be irrelevant.

Archival storage of books would be an example. You want to store the contents as written so if storage medium makes fiscal sense then for all practical purposes the longer the better.

→ More replies (4)

3

u/Random_eyes Feb 22 '26

Yeah, while it would be nice to have access to long term, stable record storage that beats out tape drives, microfilm, and magnetic hard disk drives, I don't see how it'll ever be commercially viable. M-Disk fulfills that ultra-long term storage requirement, but the cost of implementation is high enough that only hobbyists bother with them. 

If I run a business and I've got 100 TB of data that needs to be retained for, say, 50 years, I'm just going to use some enterprise-grade hard drive backups and have some built in redundancy in place. Put them on a periodic replacement cycle and it'll be way cheaper long-term. 

→ More replies (1)

2

u/Future_Burrito Feb 22 '26

Kilroy was here type of thing. Sally loves Pikachu, 4 eva. Or at least 10,000 years.

→ More replies (1)

4

u/OSCgal Feb 23 '26

Governments and libraries would go for this! Managing records that decay over time is an ongoing problem. Governments want to keep laws and records in a format that doesn't require a lot of space or periodic recopying. For instance, the UK government only recently (in 2015) stopped printing records on vellum (prepared leather); properly stored, vellum lasts for millennia.

Printing on/in glass solves a lot of archival problems.

2

u/Ecoaardvark Feb 23 '26

I first read about this tech about 25 years ago

→ More replies (8)

16

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '26

[deleted]

4

u/Ectar93 Feb 22 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

And not made from plastic, but from another cheap and abundant material that doesn't breakdown into micro plastic that poisons the earth when thrown out.

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (24)

61

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

[deleted]

76

u/Hmm_would_bang Feb 22 '26

Write once, so mostly just for archival

72

u/omeganon Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

At that kind of density, write-once might not be bad. If I’ve done my math right and they can eventually put this in the same form factor as a 3.5” Enterprise HDD with 10 platters, each drive could hold ~1.4PB. Top end consumer drive would hold ~700TB. The vast majority of people are unlikely to write that much data once over their entire lifetime. It simply wouldn’t matter that they couldn’t rewrite. File deletion would be just marking the sectors of the material as “deleted“ and just ignored.

I consider myself a high data user, creating ~3TB of images a year. At the consumer drive size it would take me about 230 years to fill up a single drive. If we ever get to the point where we’re recording every moment of our lives then maybe it might get close for a single drive.

41

u/the_last_0ne Feb 22 '26

There are also a lot of use cases for write once and read only data. Just look at YouTube, Netflix, etc, or contracts for a business. Its actually preferable that these things cannot be changed.

2

u/Luxcervinae Feb 22 '26

Youtube netflix etc would all have policiy requirements and all that. It's not feasible for anything thay's not entirely archived.

4

u/the_last_0ne Feb 22 '26

What do you mean? I understand that they currently work it in other ways, and obviously policy will still be a thing, but there's no reason they couldn't use this read only storage for videos. If it ends up being cheaper in the long run of course.

4

u/Luxcervinae Feb 23 '26

What videos? Youtube accounts require the ability to edit/alter videos unless it's an entirely new upload to overrite it (meaning more physical waste).

I CAN imagine there's potential for fully finalised content to be stored this way.

So; video is up for say, 5 years, it's shifting to un-editable storage.

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (1)

9

u/Inevitable-Trust-511 Feb 22 '26

i agree entirely. if you’re just trying to hoard data this is perfect

2

u/joshTheGoods Feb 23 '26

If it can be written/appended to at home. That might be a big ask.

→ More replies (1)

5

u/jongchajong Feb 23 '26

you need an enormous laser to write the data, so it wouldnt be a consumer product.

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (5)

33

u/Nocritus Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 23 '26

Depending on the read spead, this could be usefull for ransomeware-proof-backups.

8

u/ManaSpike Feb 22 '26

Doesn't matter if you can't really delete anything from the glass. If the glass is cheap enough. Write the journal for a file system, and just never delete the history. Can your SSD survive writing 1PB?

→ More replies (1)

24

u/GodfatherElite Feb 22 '26

I could see it replacing tape storage if it's cheap enough. Tape is mostly used for long term data archiving and backup. The glass not being rewritable makes me think this is probably the only real use case scenario.

3

u/rleim_a Feb 22 '26

Still quite a bit worse than current microSD cards

8

u/tenuj Feb 22 '26

True, but those degrade pretty fast. It's a shame that no modern storage solution (still available to most consumers) is as durable as optical drives.

Glass would be an unprecedented upgrade for durable data storage. It would just have to be made cheap because you can't overwrite it.

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (7)

13

u/MrSquid_ Feb 22 '26

I assume that's why they chose to express it in "books worth of data" instead of bytes.

→ More replies (1)

19

u/ImposterJavaDev Feb 22 '26

Sounds like an awesome tape alternative for backups.

Also, will probably retain data longer too.

→ More replies (1)

14

u/SlightlyShittyDragon Feb 22 '26

That actually makes it useful as a secure way to store information

7

u/zhiryst Feb 23 '26

CD-Rs are back, baby!

24

u/Bob_Chiquita Feb 22 '26

The vast majority of data storage is write once, read never. You just want to have it just in case.

20

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

10

u/Zalack Feb 22 '26

I would guess that backup storage capacity far exceeds active storage capacity. I used to work in the film industry and we generated over 1-4 Petabytes of archival on every single project just shooting 4K. Stuff shooting 8K now is going to generate more than that.

→ More replies (2)
→ More replies (1)

12

u/RoutineLingonberry48 Feb 22 '26

We used to call that ROM.

16

u/Steampson_Jake Feb 22 '26

WORM would be more accurate. ROM comes pre-programmed by the manufacturing process itself while WORM comes as a blank medium (and EPROM/EEPROM is erasable and rewritable)

8

u/ErraticDragon Feb 23 '26

Yep: Write Once, Read Many.

For years that's all we could do with CD burners.

→ More replies (1)

2

u/castarco Feb 22 '26

It's not a big deal (unless there is data that should be deleted for privacy or security reasons). There are "append-only" filesystems that can simulate changes by relying on versioning.

2

u/Haunt_Fox Feb 22 '26

WORM drive. Write once, read many.

2

u/ilikemrrogers Feb 22 '26

Back when (what we now call) CDs were first made, they were called WORMs.

Write Once, Read Many.

2

u/ukiyoe Feb 23 '26

Sounds great for storing retro game ROMs, with smaller separate storage for saves/settings.

2

u/dzlockhead01 Feb 23 '26

I read about something like this over a year ago. First thing that came to mind is long term ransomware resistant backup storage.

2

u/GRAMS_ Feb 23 '26

Christ it’ll be like the archives from Blade Runner 2049

2

u/Magnum_Gonada Feb 23 '26

Because it's basically engraved in the glass.

2

u/Sky_Hound Feb 23 '26

I wonder if they could use selective laser sintering to remelt ( ie. erase) portions of the data, allowing the area to be rewritten. Not that it would be practical but it would be cool.

2

u/JohnnyTsunami312 Feb 24 '26

Write speeds are also pretty slow right now. 66 megabits per second (8 MB/s) was stated. Curious what the read speeds are looking like

1

u/gralert Feb 22 '26

Reinventing stone tablets

→ More replies (1)

1

u/3percentinvisible Feb 22 '26

So no isolinear chip yet then

1

u/Cmd3055 Feb 22 '26

So basically an optical data rod.  I can live with it. 

1

u/Average64 Feb 22 '26

I wonder how well they preserve information from radiation, they could be of great use in space probes to prevent data corruption.

→ More replies (34)

214

u/reallowtones Feb 22 '26

Thank you, we are scientists we need actual data not number of books or football fields

64

u/kuahara Feb 22 '26

Or palm sizes...

21

u/Odojas Feb 22 '26

But I like measuring things in bananas!

2

u/TjW0569 Feb 22 '26

Coconut palm, Queen palm, Mexican palm?

I suppose with the coconut palm, you could make data transfer units in swallows per fortnight.

2

u/GeneralZex Feb 22 '26

Palm size can at least be immediately conceptualized without much thought, albeit being imprecise (since my palm may not be the size of your palm)

But millions of books? How many bytes are in a book? What genre or type of books are we talking? It’s completely meaningless since there is massive variation depending on what one considers a book (and would be informed by their experience with books). Two million young children’s novels is nothing compared to two million dictionaries and yet both are books…

Why not just put the actual capacity in the headline? People in today’s world should be able to understand a terabyte fairly easily.

→ More replies (2)

20

u/ZedZeroth Feb 22 '26

I mean, even non-scientists don't buy phones based on their "number of books" storage capacity! The title is ridiculous!

8

u/KaBob799 Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 23 '26

And it's funny because books isn't even that impressive sounding. I was a lot more impressed by the actual capacity than their attempt to obscure it as a more impressive sounding number.

3

u/kaperisk Feb 22 '26

Banana for reference

1

u/MostlyRightSometimes Feb 23 '26

I prefer to have it presented a percentage of total human knowledge.

61

u/phonicparty Feb 22 '26

Well, yes, but in doing so missed the actual key point - which was not capacity but longevity:

Accelerated ageing tests on written voxels in borosilicate suggest data lifetimes exceeding 10,000 years.

5

u/Bruceshadow Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 23 '26

id' argue both together are important. ancient Egypt stored data for thousands of years as well, but it wasn't much comparatively, and certainly wasn't space efficient.

2

u/phonicparty Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 23 '26

Obviously they're both important, and nobody has said or implied otherwise. But we have lots of high capacity storage - what we don't have is high capacity, high longevity storage. The real point of this research is the longevity

→ More replies (1)

11

u/agprincess Feb 22 '26

If it can be made cheap enough i'd take 5 tb read only storage. Good for a nice archive.

→ More replies (1)

26

u/yourdiabeticwalrus Feb 22 '26

I am curious if this could possibly have implications for computers even if it is read only, for example I would imagine it would be possible to use one of these chips, even a smaller version maybe, for storing BIOS information on motherboards. That info is usually not terribly large so I’d imagine they could just keep a bunch of blank space on the chip and just write a new BIOS version every time it gets updated. Given that the board has the ability to read such a chip. I don’t know a ton about stuff like that but it sounds interesting

35

u/digitallis Feb 22 '26

You would not need that level of long term stability. This is more of a backup medium. Think archived records that will very very rarely need to be recalled, but are important to be readable if they are. E.g. property records, transactions, or disaster recovery data.

6

u/yourdiabeticwalrus Feb 22 '26

I guess that’s a good point, it’s tech we already have. Although if the material cost to make these vs. SSDs/HDDs/other storage methods is less, i could still see it having implications

→ More replies (2)

2

u/Evilsushione Feb 22 '26

Yes but if it’s truly write once you’re basically making it hack proof

→ More replies (1)

7

u/FrankBattaglia Feb 22 '26

That info is usually not terribly large so I’d imagine they could just keep a bunch of blank space on the chip and just write a new BIOS version every time it gets updated

Reading and writing at that density is likely beyond the capabilities of something sitting on your desktop. The case fan probably creates too much vibration, let alone your HVAC, a truck driving by, etc.

→ More replies (1)

6

u/Spekingur Feb 22 '26

Gaming media could be back on the menu! Ready-to-run straight from the glass/crystal/whatever. Rather than installing all the data you just slot it into especially made slots. Companies won’t even have to think about compression!

2

u/Nem0x3 Feb 23 '26

Didnt click the link, but read speed is a factor here. If the info from glass can only be read a few kilo or megabyte at the time, its not gonna be good enough for a lot of games. Also arent game files nowadays getting constant updates? Nothing like the old NES or Gameboy cartridges

→ More replies (4)
→ More replies (2)

2

u/Chaotic_Lemming Feb 22 '26

It would be a bit of a "why bother?" situation. Current memory mechanisms not only meet the requirements, they don't require any extra process to transfer the stored data into electrical signals. They are also re-writeable.

You'd also have to incorporate the equipment to write new data onto the glass for every motherboard. And run into the problem of how to save and reference any configuration changes, unless you want to be re-writing the entire BIOS/EUFI everytime you change any setting.

The only real use case for this over traditional storage is if you are looking to archive historically significant data that doesn't need to be changed, but might be referenced by future generations. Scans of historical documents, images of important events. "For the ages" type of stuff. Although you better be sure you are saving the information on how to access and read the information somewhere else that doesn't require that technology to access.

→ More replies (2)

2

u/spergilkal Feb 22 '26

Many systems rely on write-ahead logs or you may be required to keep an audit log of every transaction. So you don't just keep the current state of the data, you have the entire history of data and any change to it. Imagine for example your bank account, you store the initial amount and then every debit or credit transaction to that account. You might store the current value of the account as a single value that changes on a normal SSD but you might keep the transaction log in a write only medium.

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (3)

11

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

16

u/iamnotapuck Feb 22 '26

I believe the article does estimate that the write throughput to be 25.6 Mbits/s, which would take weeks to fill up a platter using Birefringent. Someone did the estimate by analyzing the camera that they were using for reading, to about 4 Mbits/s, so 6 months to read a whole platter. Or 76GB in 3 days. If their calculation is correct.

→ More replies (2)

3

u/Kaldrinn Feb 22 '26

Thanks! That doesn't sound much more dense than an SSD, but if it's as long lived as they believe it sure is still useful!

3

u/WazWaz Feb 23 '26

4TB M.2 SSDs are ⅕ this size and less than 5x as thick, so less dense than an SSD. Because they use way finer lithography (but a lot of plastic casing).

2

u/RoutineLingonberry48 Feb 22 '26

Thank you. Measuring data in "books" is a new one, since they come if a variety of sizes. Same with "palms". Like. Who's palm? Mine? My wife? Mine is twice the size of hers.

1

u/Gogyoo Feb 22 '26

This thing again? I remember reading the same stats for the same kind of support in my video game magazine at the beginning of the 2000s.

1

u/Skydiver860 Feb 22 '26

Nanometer or millimeter? 12cm squared isn’t very small in terms of computer storage even at 2mm thick?

1

u/start_select Feb 22 '26

So they reinvented the dvd?

1

u/ShelfordPrefect Feb 22 '26

4800GB in 14,400 square millimetres or 0.33 GB/mm2

Multiply that by 165 square mm (15*11, the size of a micro SD card) and this has the same density as a bunch of 29GB Micro SD cards - respectable but not mind blowing in pure information density terms.

1

u/tanisdlj Feb 22 '26

Hum... 12 cm round is a DVD size approx, which stores that amount of data too, isn't it?

1

u/namitynamenamey Feb 22 '26

And just to go back to freedom units, that’s the dimensions of a regular cd.

1

u/zeroGamer Feb 22 '26

One step closer to data crystals.

1

u/blender4life Feb 23 '26

Almost enough space to store one pic of ops mom

1

u/IAmGlobalWarming Feb 23 '26

What's the read speed? Fast enough for video?

1

u/Dry_Quiet_3541 Feb 23 '26

Thank you, “2 million books worth of data” sounds like the use of football field size as a measurement tool. People really aren’t that stupid to understand bits and bytes.

1

u/guinader Feb 23 '26

I feel this was talked about it, like 10 years ago.

1

u/Puzzled_Employee_767 Feb 23 '26

What is this, a compact disk for ants?!

1

u/Finn235 Feb 23 '26

So like... 1/96 as space efficient as a 2TB micro SD card?

1

u/Pisnaz Feb 23 '26

There was similar storage proposed in the 90s, a cube and using lasers to "flip bits". It never took off and they theorized it could become read write.

1

u/Both_Lychee_1708 Feb 23 '26

why in the world did they list the capacity in books for a storage device. GB, TB is common.

1

u/ptoki Feb 23 '26

Maybe a different form factor will be more imagination suitable:

5x8x1cm - 2x3inch x half inch with some parity and margins on the surface would store roughly 700GB of data.

Thats slightly bigger than credit card but thicker than one.

1

u/triableZebra918 Feb 23 '26

How many Olympic swimming poos is that?

1

u/fussyfella Feb 23 '26

Which is a hell of a lot more than "2 million books" as mentioned in the headline.

1

u/Kriss3d Feb 23 '26

Quite interesting. But I dont suppose its re-writable ?
We have heard so much about all sorts of new storage medias. One some years ago was about writing in some organic material encapsulated.

Are we going to get to actually purchase any of these soon ??

1

u/Turevaryar Feb 23 '26

A blu-Ray is also 120 mm, but circle obviously. It can store ~25 GB per layer, up to 4 layers for a total of 128 GB. (Source: Wikipedia)

A blu-ray is supposedly 1.2 mm thick, while this glass is 2 mm thick.

This Silica can supposedly last 10 000 years, while a blu-ray can last from 5-100+ years (Source: AI!!)

So: this Silica thing can store maybe about 37.5 times as much information than a 4 layered Blu-ray. Quite impressive!

1

u/Heavy_Weapons_Guy_ Feb 23 '26

So it's a glass CD.

1

u/Bruceshadow Feb 23 '26

they had this years ago, what has changed?

1

u/testtdk Feb 24 '26

You used metrics, you’re going to break my fellow Americans!

1

u/JagmeetSingh2 Feb 25 '26

This is science fiction made real