Overview
- In a Nature paper, Microsoft’s Project Silica extends glass storage from costly fused silica to common borosilicate, writing data as 3D voxels with femtosecond lasers.
- A 12 cm by 12 cm by 2 mm pane held up to 4.8 TB across roughly 301 layers, with data retrieved using a single‑camera optical reader and machine‑learning decoding.
- Accelerated aging tests extrapolate data retention of at least 10,000 years, including survivability projections from exposure at 290°C.
- Write speed remains the main bottleneck versus HDDs and SSDs, with lab demonstrations reported around 66 megabits per second using multi‑beam writing and far lower in other tests.
- Reporting notes open questions about resistance to physical breakage or chemical corrosion, and Microsoft frames the platform as write‑once archival media with the research phase complete and future productization undecided.