Mark Megahan
Humans generate a huge amount of data and we’re piling up more and more of it all the time. Much of it is important enough to preserve long term. The best way anyone has come up with to store information, for thousands of years at a stretch, is etching it on glass. Microsoft calls it Project Silica.
Data under glass
Data can be stored like books for an incredibly long time. It’s not hard to imagine a robot which whirs along a shelf to select a napkin-sized square of glass. The contraption then delivers it to a specially built microscope.
It’s not hard to imagine because you can see one in action. The glass sheets may look clear at first glance but they’re filled with layer upon layer of speckled dots.
The microscope is used as an optical instrument to read the digital bits stored in binary patterns etched by a high-speed laser. Each pane is like a futuristic book which “can hold 7 terabytes of data.”
That’s roughly the information contained in two million printed books. Project Silica is run by Richard Black at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England.
It’s a brand new approach to data storage, Black proudly declares. The computer on your desk can probably handle a terabyte or two of information. Long before you fill it up, you’ll be shopping for a new computer. That’s because “those drives last only around three to five years.”
We’re all familiar with the routine. “Every few years, you’ve got to buy a new one and copy.” And then, over and over again, “buy and copy, and buy and copy.”
Neat and clever
Data stored in a pattern of speckles inside glass sheets can last for “thousands of years,” Black explains. Maybe longer. According to industry insider Deep Jariwala, “It’s a very neat and clever idea.”
As Richard Black points out, “glass is actually quite durable. These platters can withstand all sorts of calamities.” You can boil, microwave or even scratch them without destroying the information they carry.
Unlike magnetic media, which fades away over time and is subject to accidental erasure, the patterns embedded in the crystal structure of the glass “are as durable as the glass itself.”
The data is etched into a blank with a special set of high-speed lasers.
Using a laser which can pulse as fast as “one-thousandth of one-millionth of one-millionth of a second,” it only takes a tiny amount of energy to blast a “divot” in the crystal structure. “The intensity at that point is just so mind-bogglingly high,” Black notes, “you get something called a plasma nano explosion.” The call the results a “voxel.” They can make different ones reliably. “So different types of voxels can act like 1s and 0s to represent digital data.”
These voxels “also can be layered on top of each other inside a sheet of glass. When you want to read the data, you use a microscope. It focuses on a small area of just one layer inside the glass. A camera records the pattern of voxels there.“
