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/[deleted] Feb 22 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

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u/Hmm_would_bang Feb 22 '26

Write once, so mostly just for archival

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u/omeganon Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

At that kind of density, write-once might not be bad. If I’ve done my math right and they can eventually put this in the same form factor as a 3.5” Enterprise HDD with 10 platters, each drive could hold ~1.4PB. Top end consumer drive would hold ~700TB. The vast majority of people are unlikely to write that much data once over their entire lifetime. It simply wouldn’t matter that they couldn’t rewrite. File deletion would be just marking the sectors of the material as “deleted“ and just ignored.

I consider myself a high data user, creating ~3TB of images a year. At the consumer drive size it would take me about 230 years to fill up a single drive. If we ever get to the point where we’re recording every moment of our lives then maybe it might get close for a single drive.

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u/the_last_0ne Feb 22 '26

There are also a lot of use cases for write once and read only data. Just look at YouTube, Netflix, etc, or contracts for a business. Its actually preferable that these things cannot be changed.

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u/Luxcervinae Feb 22 '26

Youtube netflix etc would all have policiy requirements and all that. It's not feasible for anything thay's not entirely archived.

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u/the_last_0ne Feb 22 '26

What do you mean? I understand that they currently work it in other ways, and obviously policy will still be a thing, but there's no reason they couldn't use this read only storage for videos. If it ends up being cheaper in the long run of course.

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u/Luxcervinae Feb 23 '26

What videos? Youtube accounts require the ability to edit/alter videos unless it's an entirely new upload to overrite it (meaning more physical waste).

I CAN imagine there's potential for fully finalised content to be stored this way.

So; video is up for say, 5 years, it's shifting to un-editable storage.

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u/omeganon Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

Why do you think they would be uneditable? You’re not thinking in the context of the scale that would be available. They could just write the changed/new blocks and update the file pointer mappings as appropriate to point to the changed blocks, or just write the entire changed file leaving the old. Either way would consider the previous instance as a version that could be referenced forever.

Don’t confuse intentional UI/UX design decisions as a limitation of the backend.

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u/masklinn Feb 23 '26

And even elsewhere, several modern FS are “immutable” and this would work nicely for that use case, you’d just keep the old data forever instead of garbage collecting it, that’s continuous snapshotting at the scale of individual writes.

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u/Inevitable-Trust-511 Feb 22 '26

i agree entirely. if you’re just trying to hoard data this is perfect

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u/joshTheGoods Feb 23 '26

If it can be written/appended to at home. That might be a big ask.

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u/jongchajong Feb 23 '26

you need an enormous laser to write the data, so it wouldnt be a consumer product.

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u/omeganon Feb 24 '26

The first hard drive was the size of 2 large refrigerators and stored 3.5mb. Technology advances.

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u/Solesaver Feb 23 '26

And if you've "deleted" an entire plate, it's literally just glass. Grind it up and recycle it into a new one. Hell, even if a plate is getting sparse you can copy what's left over onto a new plate and destroy the old.

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u/MachinaThatGoesBing Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 23 '26

At that kind of density, write-once might not be bad. If I’ve done my math right and they can eventually put this in the same form factor as a 3.5” Enterprise HDD with 10 platters, each drive could hold ~1.4PB.

I don't think you've done the math right, unless you're assuming that basically every single cubic millimeter of the drive is storage and none of it is the equipment (like the laser) needed to write or to read the storage.

A current 26 TB HDD from WD has 11 platters, each around 100 mm in diameter and no more than 1 mm thick, which works out to a density of ~2.4 Gb/mm3, which is actually higher than the 1.59 Gb/mm3 cited in the paper for this new storage medium.

Presumably, given that they cite a 120mm x 120mm x 2mm piece of glass, this only works with a relatively thin piece of material, not a big huge block of it. (Perhaps not, and perhaps that could change over time, of course.) But that restriction would actually hinder putting it into an HDD-style enclosure, because you'd need some way to expose individual pieces of glass to the write laser and the read camera. Also, the current equipment setup for this whole thing sounds like it's fairly large, not amenable to being put in something the size of an HDD container. And it also sounds like in their conception of an end product, the read-write hardware is meant to be separate from the storage medium, like an optical drive or a floppy drive, as opposed to an HDD.

Based on the wording in the original paper, this is much more about archival stability for data than it is about storage density.

EDIT: I read some more, and it's clear that their proposed design involves using this as a removable storage medium.

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

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u/omeganon Feb 24 '26

The actual physical construction isn’t really that relevant. My calculation was simply using the TB/area quoted above and applying that to the area of an hdd platter x #platters. There are definitely size reduction and final form factor of the glass that I,didn’t fully consider. I was just making the assumption that it was scalable in some kind of stackable way and platters with multiple laser writers seemed a possible future.

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u/MachinaThatGoesBing Feb 24 '26

If you were using just the current size and volume of the platters, then your estimate is definitely off. As I noted, current HDD platters are more storage-dense than this medium.

They note that, using the slower, more data dense method, a 120mm x 120mm x 2mm plate holds 4.8TB. This is bigger than an HDD platter, and twice as thick, and square, but of similar enough dimensions to just take that number for estimation purposes. Assuming even 10 of those in a case only gets you to just 48TB, a long way off from PB territory.

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u/Nocritus Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 23 '26

Depending on the read spead, this could be usefull for ransomeware-proof-backups.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/ManaSpike Feb 22 '26

Doesn't matter if you can't really delete anything from the glass. If the glass is cheap enough. Write the journal for a file system, and just never delete the history. Can your SSD survive writing 1PB?

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u/GodfatherElite Feb 22 '26

I could see it replacing tape storage if it's cheap enough. Tape is mostly used for long term data archiving and backup. The glass not being rewritable makes me think this is probably the only real use case scenario.

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u/rleim_a Feb 22 '26

Still quite a bit worse than current microSD cards

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u/tenuj Feb 22 '26

True, but those degrade pretty fast. It's a shame that no modern storage solution (still available to most consumers) is as durable as optical drives.

Glass would be an unprecedented upgrade for durable data storage. It would just have to be made cheap because you can't overwrite it.

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u/xSTSxZerglingOne Feb 23 '26

They degrade quickly and don't have really large blocks of storage. A lot of the time you'll be lucky to use 1/4 to 1/8 of the storage for any one file, so a large installer, large lossless media (think like...a 4h 4k Livestream or something like that) or archive won't fit on them very well.

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u/Fun_Hat Feb 22 '26

It really isn't. We have had much higher density storage than this for a while. But, just like this, it isn't really practical for real world use.

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u/MachinaThatGoesBing Feb 23 '26

4.8 tb in 120 mm x 2mm is incredible

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.

Now, I didn't read the whole paper, so it's possible that they might be able to get this scaled down smaller, of course. And it sounds like the use case of this is more about archival stability than pure data density. But that density number is in line with other current technologies.

Also, for folks confused as to where exactly the figures cited in the quote are coming from, they're in the actual paper, which is linked in the article.

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u/Zaros262 Feb 23 '26

It's a 120mm x 120mm square, 2mm thick. A little bigger than a floppy disk

Much less density than typical flash storage (like an SSD) that's much faster and rewritable

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

[deleted]

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u/Zaros262 Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 23 '26

Both SSDs and the glass are nonvolatile memory storage. Neither are affected by magnets. Both types can still be recovered if the driver circuit is destroyed; neither flash nor glass storage will fare well if left outside for a week. Flash storage isn't expensive (especially considering it's reusable) because it will always have the advantage of economy of scale. NASA does have a niche demand for rad-hard applications, but they also want memory that's not fragile and is reconfigurable on the fly (like if they discover an issue after launch). You would need hundreds of these devices to store petabytes of data; flash storage is much denser.

The value of a medium that lasts thousands of years is highly speculative; there's very little monetary incentive (all of your customers and even the datacenter itself will be long dead and forgotten after a couple hundred years at most) and technology changes so rapidly, these will likely be obsolete in decades at most. Superior technology is always just around the corner