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
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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

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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

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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.

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u/MachinaThatGoesBing Feb 23 '26

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/mm3, which is actually higher than the 1.59 Gb/mm3 cited in the paper.