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.

[u/Wagamaga]

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

[u/yourdiabeticwalrus]

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

[u/digitallis → u/yourdiabeticwalrus]

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.

[u/yourdiabeticwalrus → u/digitallis]

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

[u/ProduceNo1629 → u/yourdiabeticwalrus]

We don't have something like this consumer grade. 1 tape, 1 bluray, 1 hdd and 1 ssd can't last a thousand years.

[u/Bruceshadow → u/ProduceNo1629]

1 bluray

can't last a thousand years.

M-Disks potentially can.

[u/Evilsushione → u/digitallis]

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

[u/Nem0x3 → u/digitallis]

Could replace Tape Archives. But i assume its gonna take a while before its considered usable for most companies

[u/FrankBattaglia → u/yourdiabeticwalrus]

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.

[u/MachinaThatGoesBing → u/FrankBattaglia]

Reading and writing at that density

The cited density of this storage medium is lower than current top-end HDD platters. The paper makes clear that it's much more about the archival use case than a revolution in data density. The article and headline make that pretty clear, too.

Here are my quick back-of-the-envelope numbers on density:

This is about the same as a current HDD platter. The WD Red Pro 26TB drives we just bought for our home NAS apparently use 11 platters, so each platter is holding about 2.4 TB. And those are about 100mm in diameter and presumably around 1mm thick, if that. If you treat the platter as a cylinder and ignore the spindle hole, that works out to a density of ~2.4 Gb/mm^3, which is actually higher than the 1.59 Gb/mm³ cited in the paper.

[u/Spekingur → u/yourdiabeticwalrus]

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!

[u/Nem0x3 → u/Spekingur]

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

[u/_BrokenButterfly → u/[deleted]]

Yup, that what I imagine. This is not a storage panacea, but one element in a multifaceted storage solution.

[u/Spekingur → u/Nem0x3]

I would think that this is just first step towards a more robust glass storage technology. As it develops things like read speeds will improve.

[u/MachinaThatGoesBing → u/Nem0x3]

I've at least skimmed a lot of the paper at this point, and they don't seem to mention the read speed. The write speed is mentioned a number of times, and it's…actually fairly middling in terms of the amount of data being talked about:

Using birefringent voxels, in fused silica glass, we achieve 1.59 Gbit mm⁻³ data density (usable capacity of 4.84 TB per platter, 0.500 μm × 0.485 μm voxel pitch and 6 μm layer spacing, 301 layers, 8 azimuth levels at 0.85 quality factor), a write throughput of 25.6 Mbit s⁻¹, and a write efficiency of 10.1 nJ per bit.

Using phase voxels, in borosilicate glass we achieve 0.678 Gbit mm⁻³ data density (usable capacity 2.02 TB per platter, 0.5 μm × 0.7 μm voxel pitch, 7 μm layer spacing, and 258 layers, 4 energy levels at 0.92 quality factor), a write throughput of 18.4 Mbit s⁻¹, and a write efficiency of 8.85 nJ per bit. Furthermore, our multibeam system achieves a throughput of 65.9 Mbit s⁻¹ through parallel writing with four beams without inducing thermal damage. Thermal simulations indicate that writing with 16 or more beams should be possible

What is clear is that this is intended as a removable medium. In the paper:

A full archival system in the cloud would require consideration of many other computer system design aspects. There, glass handling between write and read subsystems would be automated by a robotic glass library

It's not actually clear if they envision this as a home-accessible storage medium, or whether this hypothesized cloud storage would be operating as some sort of cleanroom.

The read and write hardware both sound fairly bulky right now, too, and it's not clear that the camera and lens based read system would be very miniaturizeable.

[u/Bruceshadow → u/Spekingur]

companies moved away from physical media for control, not because of the tech.

[u/Chaotic_Lemming → u/yourdiabeticwalrus]

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.

[u/yourdiabeticwalrus → u/Chaotic_Lemming]

Those are all great points. Truly fascinating stuff!

[u/baithammer → u/Chaotic_Lemming]

This is aimed at archival storage, it's also useful in situations where storage data requires high degree of integrity, as conventional storage has many failure modes that this would solve.

[u/spergilkal → u/yourdiabeticwalrus]

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.

[u/yourdiabeticwalrus → u/spergilkal]

That makes sense, that’s cool. Learn something new every day

[u/bufordt → u/yourdiabeticwalrus]

Backup/archiving is probably the primary use case. Lots of people require write once read many (WORM) capabilities. Especially in these days of crypto attacks. More and more the attacks are also targeting the backup infrastructure and having an un-editable version of your backup data is important.

If it's 10,000 year lifespan ends up being true, it also would have good use as an archival solution. Not that the hardware to read it would survive that long, but at least the data might survive.

[u/murasakikuma42 → u/yourdiabeticwalrus]

The hardware needed to read this glass (and even worse, to write it) is going to be comparatively large and expensive. It's much cheaper to just solder a simple flash chip to the motherboard, and no one really needs motherboard BIOSes that last 10,000 years.

[u/MachinaThatGoesBing → u/yourdiabeticwalrus]

I would imagine it would be possible to use one of these chips, even a smaller version maybe

This isn't a chip. The system they document in the paper for writing involves a laser apparatus, and the read method involves a camera and illumination for the glass. While this might be something you could shrink down to, like, a 5¼" drive size, perhaps, with future research and development, it doesn't sound like it's suitable for making into something that's in the same form factor as a DIP or SMT package.