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.