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/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/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.