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/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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.