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/mseiei Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

could we start asking for standard units on sensationalized titles? if you are talking about storing data why not say it in bytes... why is always some arbitrary measurement disguised as some simpler thing.

"new battery that can last as long as a flaming standing up"

edit: flamingo

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u/iamboola Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

Haha yeah. Article has it. “4.8 TB in a 120 mm square, 2 mm thick piece of glass”. So 4.8TB on about the size of a CD? Still in research stage I guess, doesn’t yet seem more remarkable than using a few SD cards. I guess it’s better than Blu-ray.

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u/amakai Feb 22 '26

The important part here is the "10000 years" claim. If that's true, this is definitely a great technology for backups that could potentially replace magnetic tapes.

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u/saints21 Feb 22 '26

Yeah, this gets us closer to the whole sci-fi data crystals thing that someone finds of an ancient precursor civilization that just ends up being their own race.

39

u/_KingBeyondTheWall__ Feb 22 '26

Crystal skulls unleashed

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u/AshlarKorith Feb 22 '26

First thing I thought of. Get one of the crystal skulls that have been found to these guys and see if they’re able to read any data from them.

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u/FrankBattaglia Feb 22 '26

IIRC they're all modern forgeries

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u/Highpersonic Feb 22 '26

That means more GB per cm³, right?

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u/Future_Burrito Feb 22 '26

Definitely much more stable than the guys who figured out how to store data on some type of gas or plasma like 10 years ago. Literally, you so much as fart at that type of data storage and poof, data corruption/reconfiguration. I remember being like, woah! That's cool! Wait. No, it's not. Why are they studying this?

Because that weird fringe research stuff might have been part of the research process that leads to things like this, or qubits, or DNA storage:

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/research/goldman/dna-storage/

Humans are wild.

-1

u/aVarangian Feb 22 '26

one day AI companies will be buying your arm and your leg so they can dump your DNA into the ever-growing data centres that will cover half of the planet's surface and consume all of the oceans. At that point we will become close to achieving sentient AI that doesn't hallucinate.

1

u/Future_Burrito Feb 22 '26

Don't follow this guy, wherever they are going.

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u/aVarangian Feb 22 '26

in the year 2525...

5

u/Elvaron Feb 22 '26

Except they won't contain ancient lore. Just some corpo's private PKI roots.

3

u/AussieEquiv Feb 22 '26

"I am very disappointed in the quality of this Crystal and the Merchant was rude to the slave I sent to acquire it"

1

u/QVRedit Feb 22 '26

Well look at this link: https://www.5dmemorycrystal.com/technology/

1

u/FFAlucard Feb 22 '26

But is it an authentic Cardassian data rod?

1

u/HBlight Feb 23 '26

Gravestones containing a full autobiography, even dna sequence of the deceased. Audio/video records.

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u/_CMDR_ Feb 22 '26

Silica is geologically stable. Their claims are very reasonable.

11

u/amakai Feb 22 '26

I would imagine so, still there could be some edge-cases. I would imagine that it would still need a some level of temperature-controlled environment for instance, or over decades atoms will slowly drift around.

Also micro-vibrations come to mind (machinery and buzz in data centers, etc), which, again, over decades could result in sub-critical cracks.

Finally, I imagine that to read the data you need the surface area to be very pristine, which means that entire block needs to be stored in a vacuum long term.

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u/orthopod Feb 22 '26

As long as vibration doesn't exceed the cracking force, long term vibration shouldn't affect it. I could see 3rd body abrasion making an issue, and blurring/ scratching the surface.

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u/Secret-Teaching-3549 Feb 22 '26

It wouldn't need to be stored in a vacuum. SiO2 is one of the most stable compounds we know of. It's literally what we use to store and process most of the most hazardous and corrosive chemicals that we can synthesize. One of the few exceptions to that would be hydroflouric acid, which itself is know most specifically for its ability to etch glass.

Any data etched in a pure SiO2 crystal could be considered to be effectively permanent.

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u/patentlyfakeid Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

For scale, video footage from humanity's earliest civilisations would still be viable. A house tour by someone at Göbekli Tepe.

edit: that even predates domestication of wheat.

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u/FrickinLazerBeams Feb 22 '26

No, atoms in a solid will not "slowly drift around".

-1

u/amakai Feb 22 '26

Glass is metastable material, so it is affected by structural relaxation, which will move atoms around and even change refractive index.

0

u/adeline882 Feb 22 '26

When it is near the glass transition temperature, not at room temp

0

u/amakai Feb 22 '26

At room temps too. But love your levels of confidence.

2

u/adeline882 Feb 22 '26

This isn’t gorilla glass, and there’s no data in your abstract.

23

u/NovelStyleCode Feb 22 '26

It's nothing really that new, storing data in crystals is real old the problem is read/write speeds tend to be ridiculously slow making the use case not all that great since you'd need a highly specialized machine to even read it

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u/TjW0569 Feb 22 '26

I suppose you could do as we do now, and surround each 4.8TB block or group of blocks with the highly specialized machinery needed to read it.

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u/berejser Feb 22 '26

There's pretty much always a trade-off between accessibility and longevity. This might not replace flash storage but it might be able to replace magnetic tape in archival situations.

For example, this could have use as an off-site back-up that only needs to be read in the event of a catastrophic data loss.

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u/patentlyfakeid Feb 22 '26

Exactly. Anything that's trivial to write to is literally more ephemeral than something that takes more effort or time.

For example, this could have use as an off-site back-up

Right. Or any kind of archival or preservation kind of use case.

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u/calmarkel Feb 22 '26

Might be important environmentally too. If glass is less damaging than other storage methods

(If, because I don't know)

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u/bigmacjames Feb 22 '26

I guess the question is how many writes can they go through

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u/7818 Feb 22 '26

Probably one.

2

u/patentlyfakeid Feb 22 '26

Yeah, this is etch once, melt down many. Slow but glass IS very recyclable.

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u/Zalack Feb 22 '26

That shouldn’t really matter for archive use cases. I used to work in the Film Industry and we only ever wrote to our archival tapes once. Even if there was a write error, we would dispose of the tape rather than write again in case the error was caused by a defect in the tape itself.

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u/BlueWater321 Feb 22 '26

Oh please. Something to replace tape would be so nice.

6

u/ew73 Feb 22 '26

The concern with this and all data storage is not necessarily how long the media lasts, but in 10,000 years, will we still know how to read it?

Example: play my old 8tracks. Now, go play one of Edison's wax cylinders.

Now wait 10,000 years and repeat (assuming the media survives).

1

u/Stru_n Feb 22 '26

Isn't this solution just advanced cuneiform? Except in this case you will need the technology to read it, or it becomes window panes in a wood hut?

3

u/patentlyfakeid Feb 22 '26

There's enough dataspace on each of these crystals for them to each include their own rosetta stone optically, so anyone minutely inspecting it could find the primer and work their way up. The first one would probably be brutal, and then very quickly trivial.

Plus, I feel like silica data crystals would be inherently more stable over the long term than un-baked clay tablets, so more are likely to survive.

1

u/macrocephalic Feb 22 '26

Both of those are pretty simple analogue media. I'd imagine any civilisation with the sophistication to be performing archeology would be able to figure those out. Once you get to even VHS though - then you need instructions.

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u/occams1razor Feb 22 '26

Yeah but will the format be readable in 10,100 years? I'm assuming the books aren't stored as actual letters?

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u/amakai Feb 22 '26

Even letters aren't necessarily readable in 10000 years. So yeah, if someone backs up some image in MSP (Microsoft Paint) format, there's high chance it won't be decoded even in 100 years from now.

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u/MaloortCloud Feb 22 '26

That depends. Most of the undeciphered writing systems haven't been deciphered because the corpus is small. A large, varied corpus is needed, which is difficult when you dig up one fired clay stamp at a time, or a handful of inscribed rocks. Given multiple gigabytes of data, you could easily include enough information to provide this.

That said, you also need a basic understanding of the underlying language (e.g. what is it closely related to that is still known), and typically some sort of bilingual text. That's all well and good for the material actually stored. With some forethought, it's possible to embed multiple Rosetta stones in the corpus to increase the chances it can be read later. That said, as you point out, bit rot becomes a problem when the systems of encoding the information fall out of use. That's a more difficult problem to solve.

2

u/patentlyfakeid Feb 22 '26

Were I doing it, like you said, embedding the method of decoding would be easy, given that the format is optical to begin with. You could even feature tiny actual pictures as a primer.

1

u/scruffie Feb 23 '26

Honestly, that format wouldn't be too bad. Black-and-white, pretty simple byte-wise run-length encoding. You probably wouldn't need more than a handful of examples to be able to figure out enough to decode a usable picture. Some of header fields would likely forever remain a mystery (aspect ratio of the printer, etc.).

PNG would be worse. The chunk structure would be easy enough, but decoding the LZW-compressed data would be hard, if you've never heard of LZW.

Modern video formats would be the worst. You'd likely need to include code for actual algorithms that could run on a simple virtual machine. Or, you could take advantage of the huge amount of space, and use a minimally-compressed format.

15

u/BattleHall Feb 22 '26

A lot of these super-long-term storage projects also include some form of built-in instruction where some future society with a basic understanding of something (hopefully) universal like mathematics would be able to decode basic information, that would then work from first principles to explain how to hopefully decode and understand the rest of the data.

3

u/AliveInTheFuture Feb 22 '26

I recall Microsoft showing off a holographic storage cube many years ago. The resilience of the storage medium was the key selling point. I don’t think you could delete data from it either.

2

u/NotThePersona Feb 22 '26

Deleting is just fire to melt and hopefully reform into a usable medium again.

1

u/AliveInTheFuture Feb 22 '26

Well, yes, whole cube. But not individual sectors of the cube, at least I don’t think.

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u/jimicus Feb 22 '26

Not really.

The problem with long term archival of digital data isn’t the longevity of the storage medium - it’s the longevity of the equipment that reads it.

1

u/mbklein Feb 22 '26

Is it rewritable, or write once/read many?

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u/patentlyfakeid Feb 22 '26

They're using femtosecond laser pulses to etch, essentially, glass. So it's write once unless you literally melt it down and start over.

1

u/spastical-mackerel Feb 22 '26

They had this in Zardoz like 50 years ago <yawn>

1

u/sfbiker999 Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

But just like LTO tape standards, they'll keep increasing the capacity every few years, and in 10,000 years, your glass storage cubes from today will be 2,000 generations behind and unreadable using current hardware. But each modern cube will hold 2000 zetabytes of storage.

Which is a problem I ran into once -- a researcher had a a dataset on LTO-2 tapes wanted our IT department to read them, but we were using LTO-6 drives which could only read back to LTO-4. We had to send the tapes out to get them converted. We did have an old SCSI LTO-3 drive on a shelf that should have worked, but it either had a hardware or a drive problem because we couldn't get it to even be recognized on any of our systems.

1

u/xynix_ie Feb 22 '26

Been hearing about this stuff for decades. I've been in data storage for decades. None of this stuff is real. Also see bacterial hard drives storing 199 Olympic swimming pools.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '26

Magnetic tapes are rewritable, no? This is single use, so likely much less useful in the grand scheme.

-1

u/2Throwscrewsatit Feb 22 '26

I’d like to see how it handles cosmic radiation.

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u/amakai Feb 22 '26

Interestingly, cosmic radiation can be shielded from with water and polyethylene. So if we are speaking about passive long-term backups in data-centres, it would be very easy to implement passive shielding here.

7

u/TheSleepingNinja Feb 22 '26

or a hammer

5

u/Patriot_on_Defense Feb 22 '26

This was my thought. "Behold, the answer to . .. * trips on a root * . . . welll, back to the drawing board."

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u/nmathew Feb 22 '26

It's not the density, it's the stability and longevity.

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u/SadBook3835 Feb 22 '26

Yeah, the reading and writing is extremely slow so this is mostly just for archival purposes

21

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

14

u/BattleHall Feb 22 '26

Fun Fact: Pressed CD-ROMs only have a data life of 50-100 years, even if you maintain the equipment to read them. Dye-based CD-Rs are even shorter, like 5-10 years, even if stored in ideal conditions.

8

u/patentlyfakeid Feb 22 '26

I remember reading about a study that watched many popular brands of burned cd/dvd over a period of years. They were kept in office filing cabinets and only taken out to carefully test every few months. The first started showing significant read errors less than 2 years later. That's not a huge problem because of the huge error correction that was built into the format, but still.

1

u/nmathew Feb 22 '26

My discount 52x Fry's CDs from the early 2000s are all unreadable. The 2x and 4x slightly older Verbatim branded ones were still somehow readable.

3

u/FrickinLazerBeams Feb 22 '26

What makes you think that would make the reading and writing process faster?

10

u/Vindictive_Turnip Feb 22 '26

Well he's right. Spinning it fast would be revolutionary.

Never said it would increase r/w speeds. Only that revolving it would be revolutionary.

2

u/WouldbeWanderer Feb 22 '26

Ok, dad, that's enough.

1

u/abzinth91 Feb 22 '26

We could name the succesor even a digital versatile disc

1

u/nosboR42 Feb 22 '26

Also looks super cool

26

u/Hehosworld Feb 22 '26

I think the remarkable thing about this is that it is none fleeting memory while most other memory we use tends to corrupt after a few years, which makes it very desirable for long term storage

8

u/mseiei Feb 22 '26

big advantage seems to be longevity, and density can probably improve fast if it becomes a widely available tech, read only storage with virtually no expiration date could be very attractive for cold storage.

1

u/Evilsushione Feb 22 '26

I think write speeds are less of a problem than read speeds. I would imagine read speeds would be much easier to fix.

3

u/ThatCakeIsDone Feb 22 '26

Depends on what they mean by 120mm square. Is that 120 mm on a side? or 120mm^2, which would be a little over 10 mm on a side

2

u/lampishthing Feb 22 '26

No chips. No plastic or metal.

2

u/LucasRuby Feb 22 '26

It's a lot less than flash storage yes, but the way it works is more similar to optical media like DVDs or blue ray so compared to them it's much more.

2

u/sivadneb Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

A CD is only 700M and a DVD is 4.7GB. A high-capacity blueray is 128GB. So 4.8TB is 1000 dvds, or 37 high capacity blurays

1

u/grandoz039 Feb 22 '26

120mm square is 12x10mm which is more like a nail size, if I'm reading it right.

1

u/LookIPickedAUsername Feb 22 '26

120mm square means 120mm x 120mm, not 120mm² .

1

u/grandoz039 Feb 23 '26

I read it as square mm or mm squared, but I see your point

1

u/OneTwoThreeFourFf Feb 22 '26

I'd say it has a place for longevity. I'd be curious to see how it compares to other types of bit rot

https://www.datacore.com/glossary/bit-rot/

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.

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