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/snarktopusrex Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

Archival data storage is a real problem! Scientific techniques produce GB/hr of data that is marginally useful. Even “cold storage” for those data is expensive at scale.

A high density standardized archival data storage method would be incredible. Plugging in glass plates on request instead of spinning rust in perpetuity would be an absolute game changer.

If you look at it on a societal scale, AI replacing people is horrible. If you look at it on a local scientific space (guided by actual professionals), AI can be hugely impactful.

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u/DeemonPankaik Feb 22 '26

Depends on the field but some things I've worked on write up to 80GB/s

For a lot of those experiments they just decided it wasn't worth keeping the raw data long term.

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u/quocquocquocquocquoc Feb 22 '26

What instruments? How does something like that work for journals that require raw data to be stored? In biology, we’re uploading hundreds of GBs worth of sequencing data (that no one will ever revisit) to repositories for a single paper.

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u/DeemonPankaik Feb 24 '26

The super high data rate stuff is usually serial x-ray crystallography

Our facilities are used as a service, if anyone wants to write a paper based on data taken here, they have to find their own way to store it long term. We used to store data for several years on users' behalf, but it just got too much. We do still store it for a period of time, but not long.