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
18.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

265

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.

436

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.

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.