That's ~7-18 days per 120mm x 120mm medium (4.8TB).
Glass prices stable for now. Also, the authors make no statement about horizontal vs. vertical storage.
Thanks for digging this up. Every "scientists create new storage medium" is always a disappointment when you get to see the write speeds. This seems decent? At least in "raw" numbers there's nothing obviously making this useless. Let's hope they have a path to quick commercialisation and make it available. If there's any DC adoption will be the real test, I think.
LOL I've done holographic data storage in borosilicate glass using fs laser pulses for my masters thesis in physics more than a decade ago and guess what, this is not going anywhere. The claims are all wildly exaggerated also. Lots of buzzwords micro nano plasma explosions but the truth is hidden in the details: needs specialist hardware... Yeah like a 50.000 USD femto second laser setup that needs an entire basement and you wearing ski googles at all times to not get blind type of specialist hardware. Guess we're all gonna put that in our living rooms, won't we?
And the storage density is limited by all kinds of effects that I won't even get into it but you can roughly assume its at best half or even less of that and then it starts becoming much less impressive.
Yes you can microwave a slab of glass or go diving with it and it will still be intact but unless we make machines that read and store data much more easily, like significantly absurdly more easily, this is the biggest pipe dream of them all.
I have read a variation of this headline once every 2 years since the early 2000s, yet never seen it turn into something real (that a consumer / enterprise can buy).
It's whether Microsoft will be fair and flexible licensing their patents to third-parties.
Otherwise I'd suggest that if they keep it all to themselves and charge like a wounded bull, uptake would be quite limited.
At least until the original patents expires, which might be the better strategic move for third-parties in light of a hostile Microsoft given how long this archival format is expected to last.
It's common to perform longevity testing at higher temperatures to simulate longer lifetimes, in account of nobody has decades of time to actually perform a 1x time test.
I wonder if "damp" modes of decay could still damage them though, which isn't captured in this style of testing. Like some wet chemical or biological process.
Depends on what you etch on there. If it’s binary representation of actual alphabets then sure. If it’s a video file then without the software to decipher and manipulate the data, it would be pretty indecipherable. How to read an mp4 is not part of the data itself.
You could "bootstrap" all the information required to produce the hardware to read this, by starting with human-readable instructions for the next step.
If Nanni could have engraved his shitpost about Ea-nasir's copper into multiple glass tablets, easy to distribute, that would last for 10000 years, he probably would have.
Something I've always wondered.. could things like tree rings, or birdsong and other mating rituals (the species can survive only by replicating the sequences) be used for "data storage" by some hypothetical intelligences that think on scales of thousands of years?
Glass is one of the more stable things we can make. This seems pretty good! I don't have an application that requires ten thousand years of storage but I'm sure someone out there does!
> I don't have an application that requires ten thousand years of storage but I'm sure someone out there does!
A) record (a representative cross-section of) "everything" and leave multiple copies where future archeologists might find it. To avoid things like how present-day archaeologists apparently have holes in the kinds of things they can find, due to different social classes not leaving equally-robust trails.
B) this is "at least as long as I could possibly care about" storage. If I need to retain say financial records for seven years, and then later the government retroactively increases that to 20 years, there's no need to re-archive it all onto new media.
> B) this is "at least as long as I could possibly care about" storage. If I need to retain say financial records for seven years, and then later the government retroactively increases that to 20 years, there's no need to re-archive it all onto new media.
In many countries this "maximum (6 or) 7 years" for financial records is only if the local IRS decides that you're not potentially committing fraud. If they decide you've potentially committed fraud at any time in the past, there's no limit as to how far they can go. Even in the US stuff like (some of the) funds stolen by the Enron scam have been successfully clawed back more than two decades after the fact.
At least that's the case in several EU countries: there's literally no limit if the country's IRS equivalent decides you're potentially committing fraud (or if you did in the past).
Which is insane and totally arbitrary but that's how it is.
In addition to that under a great many KYC/AML excuses, there are banks out there that shall have zero issue asking you to justify the "source of funds" and at times I've had to provide info dating from way more than seven years in the past. I've heard --and I'm not shitting you-- from someone proving he bought for about 5 K EUR of something that went up more than 100x (think Bitcoin or some exceptionally successful stock), that his bank answered something like: "OK, but now that you've proven you actually made 100x, prove us the source of the 5 K EUR in 2013!".
That's what happens to a society when you give too much power to petty people.
There are literally collaborationists out there that are going to fill SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports) when someone can prove he turned 5 K into 500 K not on the 500 K (which are impossible to dispute) but on the 5 K that were used in the first place. That's how jealous and incompetent some people are in this world.
Things became so bad that I now have a Git versioned repo (and backups everywhere) where I keep track of, among other, every single wire transfer above 10 K EUR. I've got stuff dating back to 2001 when I bought my first apartment etc.
Don't underestimate how pathetic and bitter some of the people you'll have to deal with (be it from your local IRS or a bank) are going to be.
You can get a 6mmx6mmx1.2mm pure industrial diamond sheet for about $1000 [1]. That should be able to hold around 300 GB with this method and would last practically forever.
I thought I was experiencing some Mandela affect, had to Bing it. This is from 2022 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/project-silic...
So a rough estimate, at the size of UMD, used in Playstation Portable, slightly smaller than the size of Mini Disc, it could store 1TB.
I assume we could do double layer in the future for 2TB.
For comparison that is roughly 1000x times the capacity of UMD. I would love to have this. Burn a few of these as backup and call it a day.
Definitely. If it actually achieves those speeds it's perfectly reasonable for long-term/cold storage.
Now, can someone please help me get some data of this Iomega ZIPdrive disc?
Wheres my futuristic storage guys?
And the storage density is limited by all kinds of effects that I won't even get into it but you can roughly assume its at best half or even less of that and then it starts becoming much less impressive.
Yes you can microwave a slab of glass or go diving with it and it will still be intact but unless we make machines that read and store data much more easily, like significantly absurdly more easily, this is the biggest pipe dream of them all.
Cool tech though :)
Will it run on Linux ?
> The authors of the paper have filed several patents relating to the subject matter contained in this paper in the name of Microsoft Corporation.
Page 12 of the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10042-w.pdf
It's whether Microsoft will be fair and flexible licensing their patents to third-parties.
Otherwise I'd suggest that if they keep it all to themselves and charge like a wounded bull, uptake would be quite limited.
At least until the original patents expires, which might be the better strategic move for third-parties in light of a hostile Microsoft given how long this archival format is expected to last.
10,000 years sounds like a good benchmark and isn't as obviously ridiculous as saying a million years at 260°C
I think we should stick to proven solutions for millennia-robust information storage and paint it on walls inside pyramids.
In fact, look what we’re doing right now with all our past’s relics!
Something I've always wondered.. could things like tree rings, or birdsong and other mating rituals (the species can survive only by replicating the sequences) be used for "data storage" by some hypothetical intelligences that think on scales of thousands of years?
A) record (a representative cross-section of) "everything" and leave multiple copies where future archeologists might find it. To avoid things like how present-day archaeologists apparently have holes in the kinds of things they can find, due to different social classes not leaving equally-robust trails.
B) this is "at least as long as I could possibly care about" storage. If I need to retain say financial records for seven years, and then later the government retroactively increases that to 20 years, there's no need to re-archive it all onto new media.
In many countries this "maximum (6 or) 7 years" for financial records is only if the local IRS decides that you're not potentially committing fraud. If they decide you've potentially committed fraud at any time in the past, there's no limit as to how far they can go. Even in the US stuff like (some of the) funds stolen by the Enron scam have been successfully clawed back more than two decades after the fact.
At least that's the case in several EU countries: there's literally no limit if the country's IRS equivalent decides you're potentially committing fraud (or if you did in the past).
Which is insane and totally arbitrary but that's how it is.
In addition to that under a great many KYC/AML excuses, there are banks out there that shall have zero issue asking you to justify the "source of funds" and at times I've had to provide info dating from way more than seven years in the past. I've heard --and I'm not shitting you-- from someone proving he bought for about 5 K EUR of something that went up more than 100x (think Bitcoin or some exceptionally successful stock), that his bank answered something like: "OK, but now that you've proven you actually made 100x, prove us the source of the 5 K EUR in 2013!".
That's what happens to a society when you give too much power to petty people.
There are literally collaborationists out there that are going to fill SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports) when someone can prove he turned 5 K into 500 K not on the 500 K (which are impossible to dispute) but on the 5 K that were used in the first place. That's how jealous and incompetent some people are in this world.
Things became so bad that I now have a Git versioned repo (and backups everywhere) where I keep track of, among other, every single wire transfer above 10 K EUR. I've got stuff dating back to 2001 when I bought my first apartment etc.
Don't underestimate how pathetic and bitter some of the people you'll have to deal with (be it from your local IRS or a bank) are going to be.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-fiction-glas...
[1] https://e6cvd.com/us/material/single-crystalline.html?utm_so...