Microsoft hails advances in glass data storage technology that could preserve information for 10,000 years

Microsoft reckons it's made a major breakthrough in glass data storage technology, touting a new technique it says can preserve information for 10,000 years.

Magnetic tape and hard drives degrade within decades, leading to research into glass - a permanent data storage material that is resistant to water, heat, and dust.

In the past, glass-based data storage has required expensive fused silica - a type of glass that is relatively difficult to manufacture and available from only a few sources.

However, the new Project Silica technology - detailed in an article in Nature - means it's possible to use the same borosilicate glass found in kitchen cookware and oven doors.

"This advance addresses key barriers to commercialization: cost and availability of storage media," said Microsoft partner research manager Richard Black.

"We have unlocked the science for parallel high-speed writing and developed a technique to permit accelerated aging tests on the written glass, suggesting that the data should remain intact for at least 10,000 years."

Microsoft’s new glass data storage technology

The new technique allows hundreds of layers of data to be stored in glass just 2mm thick, as with previous methods. However, the reader for the glass now needs only one camera, not three or four, thereby reducing cost and size.

The writing devices also require fewer parts, making them easier to manufacture and calibrate and enabling them to encode data more quickly.

Femtosecond lasers, which fire high-power laser pulses quadrillionths of a second long, are focused on a point within the glass to modify its optical properties and encode data as voxels, the 3D equivalent of pixels.

Microsoft said it's now able to cut the number of pulses used to form the voxel from many to only two. Crucially, the polarization of the first pulse is not important to the polarization of the voxel formed.

Notably, the tech giant has been able to build on this to enable pseudo-single-pulse writing. This involves a single pulse that can be split after its polarization is set to simultaneously form the first pulse for one voxel - where the polarization doesn’t matter - and the second pulse of another, where the set polarization is essential.

New storage methods could be coming soon

As part of the project, Microsoft revealed it has invented a new type of data storage in glass called “phase voxels”, in which the phase change of the glass is modified instead of its polarization, showing that only a single pulse is necessary to make a phase voxel.

"We demonstrated that these phase voxels can also be formed in borosilicate glass and devised a technique to read the phase information from phase voxels encoded in this material,” Black said.

“We showed that the much higher levels of three-dimensional inter-symbol interference in phase voxels can be mitigated with a machine learning classification model."

Meanwhile, by using a mathematical model of pre-heating and post-heating within the glass with a new multi-beam delivery system, the team found that many data voxels can be written in proximity in the glass at the same time, significantly increasing writing speed.

The team has also developed a new way to optimize symbol encodings using machine learning, along with a better way to understand the trade-off between error rates, error protection, and error recovery when evaluating new digital storage systems.

Crucially, a new non-destructive optical method identifies the aging of data storage voxels within the glass, finding it can support data lasting 10,000 years.

The company demonstrated these techniques with several proofs of concept - including storing Warner Bros' Superman” movie on quartz glass, and partnering with Global Music Vault to preserve music under ice for 10,000 years.

"The research phase is now complete, and we are continuing to consider learnings from Project Silica as we explore the ongoing need for sustainable, long-term preservation of digital information," said Black.

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