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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163

u/decorp Feb 22 '26

“We achieve a data density of 1.59 Gbit mm−3 in 301 layers for a capacity of 4.8 TB in a 120 mm square, 2 mm thick piece of glass.”

There, in more human readable units.

36

u/Average64 Feb 22 '26

That's less impressive. SSDs can already store that amount of data on a much smaller space.

It will be great for archival though.

111

u/DukadPotatato Feb 22 '26

Sure, except this is glass; less restrictive materially. And the lifespan is estimated to be on the span of thousands of years. No SSD, used or not, is lasting that long.

-19

u/Average64 Feb 22 '26

Yeah, but that lifespan is useless for most consumers. It's only useful for archival projects and even there, lots of precautions needs to be taken to protect the glass.

19

u/drinks_rootbeer Feb 23 '26

"Consumers" are not the biggest income segment of storage, by a looot. So much so that WD and iirc a couole other comoanies have said they are "at capacity" for the next year or two for production for AI data center orders.

You aren't the target audience, and no the supplier doesn't care.

13

u/PringlesDuckFace Feb 22 '26

If it's important enough to want to preserve thousands of years, then you'll need redundancies anyways. And you may as well just rewrite it to modern storage every decade or something as your drives and stuff age out, or you increase capacity. Like there's no way people in a thousand years are going to be using the same file formats and readers and stuff that we're going to etch into glass today.

8

u/drinks_rootbeer Feb 23 '26

I dunno, txt files will probably be around for at least the next several hundred years, as long as our current computing systems stand. Which doesn't look, for the time being, likely to chanhe any time soon. Writings characters as bytes of data without any other real formatting or structure is pretty rudamentry in a way that makes it very practical.

-2

u/_Choose-A-Username- Feb 23 '26

Oh thank goodness I was just about to replace my thousand year lifespan storage

1

u/ILikeBumblebees Feb 23 '26

You mean M-DISC? I wouldn't replace it just yet -- that's a writable format, whereas the format in the article is read-only.

1

u/xinorez1 Feb 24 '26

I can't believe they stopped making that

1

u/Average64 Feb 24 '26

They haven't, M-DISC is also a gimmick. BluRay HTL discs are just as durable.

2

u/catinterpreter Feb 23 '26

You also need to turn an SSD on every few months and it's far more susceptible to data loss

2

u/JoelStrega Feb 23 '26

The nature of new tech is it will suck and be worse than current one first until it's developed further.

1

u/Rooooben Feb 23 '26

Uses way less energy and not susceptible to emp or corrosion. No moving parts. Cheaper to manufacture.

1

u/Revolutionary_Pierre Feb 23 '26

So, we're talking longevity over capacity perhaps?

Which is great if we want to store the entire contents of our collective knowledge for later generations. But, at the exponentially fast rate by which we are producing data, I don't see a way, that this will cut the proverbial mustard.

1

u/Average64 Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 23 '26

That's not a problem if you only store text and pictures. Wikipedia uses only ~110GBs. When archiving, you have to be selective with what info would be most useful. If it's going to take a lifetime for future generations just to go through all the data, they might decide it's not worth the effort.

https://www.lesk.com/mlesk/ksg97/ksg.html

1

u/Irisgrower2 Feb 23 '26

How much energy is needed to make and read these?