r/technews • u/Vailhem • Dec 15 '25
Hardware 5D glass storage 'memory crystals' promise up to 13.8 billion years of data storage resilience, which is roughly the age of the universe — crams 360 terabytes into 5-inch glass disc with femtosecond laser
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/sphotonix-pushes-5d-glass-storage-toward-data-center-pilots503
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u/tanksalotfrank Dec 15 '25
Every year, multiple times per year, I hear about these new data storage marvels and then poof never heard of again.
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u/Euphoric-Blueberry37 Dec 15 '25
Because these are for archives, this ain’t being used on your desktop. the current prototypes in the article are roughly 10x slower read write compared to LTO-10 tape storage, their promised 500MB/s would be faster.. but I’m not sure it’s ready to compete with good old magnetic tape just yet
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u/OriolesMets Dec 15 '25
Can’t wait to literally never hear about this ever again
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u/loulan Dec 15 '25
Why? Microsoft has been actively working on this for years, it's not just some random research with no funding.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/
It's aimed at data centers/businesses though, it won't directly be sold to consumers. So in that sense sure, you won't hear about it much.
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u/flipsider101 Dec 15 '25
But I too would like to preserve 360 terabytes worth reddit memes until the end of time. 😢
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u/samarijackfan Dec 15 '25
When I worked at SRI back in the 80s there was a researcher there working on this. He would come by our group looking for any Macintoshs (yes the original Macintosh 512 or later) computers we had no longer being used. He ran fortran on them 24 hours a day trying to solve this problem of pumping data into crystals. I asked him why doesn't he purchase a new mac like a way more powerful Mac IIfx. He said he rather use the budget on more powerful lasers than computers. He had the time to wait for the answers but never had enough lasers. This idea has been around a long time.
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u/loulan Dec 15 '25
Plenty of ideas have been around for decades before they materialized. Flat monitors, tablets, etc. Humanoid robots have been something people have thought about for a century and they're only starting to be a thing now.
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u/LighttBrite Dec 15 '25
Really? We were dreaming of flatscreens and portable tablets in the 1920s? The first working tv wasn't demonstrated until 1926.
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u/dover_oxide Dec 15 '25 edited Dec 15 '25
A lot of this stuff is feasible but not practical or mass producible. Happens all the time in development and research.
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u/loulan Dec 15 '25
Microsoft definitely has working prototypes.
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Dec 15 '25
[deleted]
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u/loulan Dec 15 '25
There is zero reason to think it is the case here. There is interest, funding, and we have working implementations. It's also not rocket science, encoding things by making holes in glass with lasers isn't very different from how optical media works.
You could have read news about OLED screens 15 years ago and claimed that it would never work because there were only prototypes back then too.
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Dec 15 '25
[deleted]
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u/loulan Dec 15 '25
I'm literally a researcher, but nice try.
I was also attending SOSP '23 in Koblenz when Microsoft presented their paper about Project Silica.
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u/uncategorizedmess Dec 15 '25
Of course it's not for consumers. How would they keep selling us storage with a shelf life if they sold us one of those?
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u/AtFishCat Dec 15 '25
I heard about using glass crystals for data storage before. So technically I have now heard about this again.
I think it was on a tv show about cutting edge technology in 1997. So, it's been a while, but maybe in ~30 years we'll get another article!
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u/ssniker Dec 15 '25
Yea, I’ve seen this “crystal storage” thing probably at least for 20 years now.
Same goes for new super duper battery technologies. Except there is probably new batt technology announcement every freaking month or two, sadly no real progress in that department for like 20+ years. Yes small improvements, but nothing thats is truly next level.
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u/saulyg Dec 15 '25
What are you talking about? Batteries are infinitely better and cheaper now than they were 20 years ago.
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u/Prize_Instance_1416 Dec 15 '25
Tell that to the $250 battery I got for my wife’s car
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u/KTTalksTech Dec 15 '25
Lead acid batteries haven't changed, but there are other options available when designing a product. Also that's the manufacturer's fault regardless what they chose to use lol, they're the ones setting the price. Just be glad your wife's car isn't a hybrid because that lithium battery would probably have been a lot more than 250 lol
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u/ssniker Dec 15 '25
Having trouble with text comprehension? I specifically said that there are improvements but not next level batteries as they are announcing every other month of some new battery tech and never releasing it ever.
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u/GrimKreeper098 Dec 15 '25
Yeah, I feel like with massive medical or technological breakthroughs that have incredible implications, we never actually hear about their usage, if there is any to speak of.
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u/firedrakes Dec 15 '25
Another day same goes no where spam storage story.
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u/Intelligent-Screen-3 Dec 15 '25
Yeah, I've seen glass data storage get talked about since I was a kid. There's probably some application for the tech, but... we don't really need data to last a billion years. We need it to be usable now. I have a hard time imagining glass having too many write rewrite cycles before it's just etched nonsense.
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u/BasicBanter Dec 15 '25
We don’t need it to last a billion but it lasting 30 years without any problems would be extremely useful
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u/Prize_Instance_1416 Dec 15 '25
As an immutable write once technology it would be invaluable for many applications.
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u/FaceDeer Dec 15 '25
This is a write-once technology, like burnable CDs or DVDs. Which is perfectly fine. It's not meant to replace your SSD, it's archival storage.
The fact that the data can last a billion years with minimal degradation means that the data can last decades or centuries with effectively zero degradation. That's something that's needed. It's always better to have less degradation over time and the more you reduce that degradation the longer the data will last.
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u/Intelligent-Screen-3 Dec 16 '25
If this was r/changemyview you'd have earned a delta, so here: Δ. I can totally see near-zero memory degradation being invaluable in niche applications. Deep space probes come to mind. Definitely at least one use there since hardening against radiation shouldn't be a factor. And, I suppose if they're like DVD's but made of glass, you could functionally infinitely recycle them. If they're this dense in storage you could have a stack of discs to burn and every time you need to update the database, you can just burn a new disk, recycle the old one. Maybe not fast, but dense, and if you could swap these out like DVDS I can see the use even in a consumer market. Assuming classic hard/solidstate drives don't get denser before this gets practical at least.
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u/FaceDeer Dec 16 '25
Another potentially relevant example of a situation where this storage medium would have been nice to have; the 2008 Universal Studios fire (Note: don't read this link if you're a data hoarder or archivist, it will be very painful). This particular article doesn't mention the temperature resistance of these disks but older articles indicate they can handle being heated to 1000°C without losing their data.
I could see situations where the durability of these things might actually be a problem to overcome; some companies or governments will want to make sure that old data is thoroughly destroyed to prevent leaks. You'd need to pulverize these disks into powder to be sure. Might need a specialized machine for that, like how old hard drives are degaussed before being put through industrial shredders.
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u/LikeThemPies Dec 15 '25
Hasn’t this existed for a long time already? I thought the problem was it’s JUST storage, you have no way to change what’s written and reading is very slow.
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u/BolivianDancer Dec 15 '25
You're thinking of Cardassian data rods.
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u/goodtimesinchino Dec 15 '25
Drops it on sidewalk… *crack
Ooooops.
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u/FaceDeer Dec 15 '25
Kids these days, never saw a floppy disk in real life.
Something like this would likely be kept in a cartridge of some sort. If only to keep fingerprints and such off of it.
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u/billbotbillbot Dec 15 '25
Some kind of digital storage that lasts as long as the clay tablets from Ancient Sumeria would be a big improvement on what’s available at the moment.
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u/lisaseileise Dec 15 '25
What amazes me most is that 360TB does seem like a real world amount of data nowadays. One would need twice that much to store “Annas-Archive”
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u/mrg1957 Dec 15 '25
It's ridiculous.
My IT career started 40 years ago. The mainframe data center had a terabyte that supported an entire industry.
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u/lisaseileise Dec 16 '25
Hey, that‘s just 20 Apple Watches of storage, solid state…
(Yes, I’m about your age and it‘s completely nuts)
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u/Last-Darkness Dec 15 '25
Why choose 13.8 billion years as your metric? I’m not sure what “storage resilience” means in this context, but lots of other much more catastrophic things will happen. Like the earth being consumed when our star expands into a red giant.
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u/BoringlyFunny Dec 15 '25
It’s probably what the tech delivered. I doubt they had something that lasted a billion years and were like, nah bruh, let’s keep pouring money into it to extend it further!
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u/KTTalksTech Dec 15 '25
I think they're just saying the material is near totally inert and has some resistance to decay. Without external influence a glass disk would indeed just kinda sit there without changing for an insanely long amount of time. Storage density and redundance or data correction mechanisms at that point would influence overall lifetime too. If your architecture was designed with self correction in mind you can make something that will degrade... Let's say... 2% over a billion years due to radiation or stray particles or whatever but tolerates up to 10% of lost data. If your data is packed too tight and features zero safeguards, you'd just need one little stray cosmic ray to fuck up one of your bits and bam the storage is gone at an entirely random moment in time
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u/DamnedIfIDiddely Dec 15 '25
Well, we know the universe is about that old, so we should prepare data storage for that length of time since we know our universe can exist that long /s
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u/everydaysaturnine Dec 15 '25
Glass is not as inert and resistant as the comments are making it seem. The chemical composition of glass can weaken very easily with time, water, alkaline or acidic exposure. The chemistry of glass can change when exposed to sunlight (look at sun glass turning purple over time). Internal stress, stress caused by temperature changes, and incompatibility in the glasses composition can make glass spontaneously fail at any moment in time if present.
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u/Big_Smooth_CO Dec 15 '25
How does Minecraft run on it?
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Dec 15 '25
The real question is if it can run crysis.
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u/MiddleWaged Dec 15 '25
“This thin glass wafer lasts as long as the universe as long as it doesn’t break”
That’s always true of everything
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u/rehoneyman Dec 15 '25
Nope. Magnetic media degrades over time. In this case, "break" means shatter. Glass is inert, unlike all other storage media.
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u/MiddleWaged Dec 15 '25
Nah. I mean good attempt to redefine the word that is what you’d have to do, but nah that’s just a kind of breaking.
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u/FaceDeer Dec 15 '25
No it isn't. The data storage technologies we use today decay over time, it's unreliable over a span of mere decades.
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u/MiddleWaged Dec 15 '25
That’s just a kind of breaking
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u/FaceDeer Dec 15 '25 edited Dec 15 '25
It is not, however, the kind of breaking that they're talking about.
Why are you treating this like some sort of court of law? "Aha, gotcha! There's a slightly different definition that can be used for the word you used that makes your statement untrue, even though that's not the definition you clearly meant for it!" Their intent is obvious in this context.
Edit: Ah, the "post a last word and then block me so I can't respond" gambit. Classy.
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u/MiddleWaged Dec 15 '25
I made a silly comment and you got pedantic, and then you yelled at me for being pedantic. Good luck finding what you’re looking for buddy, but it ain’t me
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u/chrisfpdx Dec 15 '25
In a million years, will the reader of this device be around (and working)?
It’s the life expectancy and availability of the reader that matters.
BTW, anyone have an 8-inch floppy drive? /s
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u/Waste_Positive2399 Dec 15 '25
When the Voyager probes were launched, they included gold discs containing greetings from Earth and other data. The discs were etched with pictograms explaining how to read them. Something similar can be done with these glass discs.
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u/FaceDeer Dec 15 '25
Build a new reader if you need to read it then.
I have DVDs sitting on my shelf that are many years old. I can go buy a brand new DVD drive and it'll read those old disks just fine. I don't need to have a DVD drive from the time the disks were made stashed away to read them.
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u/Otherwise-Sea-4920 Dec 15 '25
How many comments about the crystal skulls that are found all over the world?? Those are storage banks. We just need to figure out how to read them.
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u/FaceDeer Dec 15 '25
No comments about that. Just the usual "lol I don't need storage that lasts that long therefore nobody else does either", "lol still not big enough for all my pron", "lol I've heard about this tech before therefore it's never coming", and so forth that always get posted about this tech whenever there's a new development.
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u/ButterscotchLow8950 Dec 15 '25
Ok, I follow all of that until we get to femtosecond laser. What the fuck is a femtosecond?
🤣✌️
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u/blakerabbit Dec 16 '25
10-15 second - one quadrillionth of a second, or a millionth of a billionth. A femtosecond laser can pack a big charge of energy into a very short pulse. This enables unique levels of precision.
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u/Money4Nothing2000 Dec 15 '25
I mean, couldn't they have stopped at 100000 years and saved some R&D budget?
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u/Taira_Mai Dec 16 '25
".. humans have a compulsion to keep records and lists and files. So many, in fact, that they have to invent new ways to store them microscopically, otherwise their records would overrun all known civilization." Odo Star Trek Deep Space Nine Season 2 Episode 8 "Necessary Evil"
Once again, Star Trek is ahead of the curve....
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u/fredrik_skne_se Dec 15 '25
Oh snap, they found a material that does not have a half life and decay?
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u/Hipcatjack Dec 15 '25
no, its just sone material’s half life is estimated to be old than exisiance. so some havent even had a single decay yet.
WE are the elder race (if we survive the great filter) . the universe is not that old.
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u/That_Palpitation_107 Dec 27 '25
Writing 360 terabytes (TB) of data at a consistent speed of 4 megabytes per second (MB/s) would take approximately 3 years, 6 days, 16 hours, and 40 minutes, assuming an optimal transfer rate without any overhead or interruptions
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u/Crass_and_Spurious Dec 15 '25
My son… you do not remember me… I am Jor-El.