Microsoft team creates data-storage system that lasts for millennia

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00502-2

by gnabgib • 5 months ago

104 93 5 months ago

gnabgib• 5 months ago

Paper [Laser writing in glass for dense, fast and efficient archival data storage](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10042-w)

ortusdux• 5 months ago

Any idea why they are reporting the estimated lifespan at 290°C? Testing seems to have been done at 440°C and above.

casey2• 5 months ago

Coz the paper gives a function for extrapolating from these tests. This is purely testing thermal decay.

10,000 years sounds like a good benchmark and isn't as obviously ridiculous as saying a million years at 260°C

idiotsecant3• 5 months ago

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.

HPsquared3• 5 months ago

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.

homarp• 5 months ago

also at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065175

wumms3• 5 months ago

Current write speed (No read speed given):

    Blu-ray (1×)            ~36   Mbit/s
    MS-Glass (single beam)  ~25.6 Mbit/s
    MS-Glass (multi-beam)   ~65.9 Mbit/s

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.

NitpickLawyer• 5 months ago

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.

stackghost2• 5 months ago

This seems decent?

Definitely. If it actually achieves those speeds it's perfectly reasonable for long-term/cold storage.

po1nt• 5 months ago

First CDs would take hour and a half to write with a laser. Once engineers take over the tech, it will might get faster.

thegrim33• 5 months ago

Write speed is probably the least important metric for people that are considering something like this. After everything with storage and longevity is taken care of, improving write speeds is a nice to have, but not the important part.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 5 months ago

No read speed given

Write only medium!

npodbielski• 5 months ago

At least it is safe for 10k years! And from everybody ever basically.

adrian_b6• 5 months ago

The reading is the done with a high-resolution video camera and the image is processed to extract the data.

This can be easily done many times faster than the writing, which is why the article is focused on the progress that Microsoft has achieved in increasing the writing speed, in comparison with their prototypes from a few years ago. It is also easy to make separate readers that are much cheaper and smaller than the writers.

The most important limitation of this device is the current very high cost of the lasers used for writing. Had they been cheaper, the writing speed could be increased by adding more lasers.

Microsoft argues that if this kind of short-pulse lasers would be mass produced, they could become much cheaper, like it has happened with the many lasers that are used now everywhere in optical fiber communication and with optical discs.

For now. this is a chicken-and-egg problem. This kind of optical storage cannot be converted into a commercial product because the lasers are too expensive and the lasers are too expensive because there is no high-volume market for them.

Even the current level of performance would be enough for myself. If I could afford such a device, I would buy it instantly, to stop worrying about having to buy periodically new HDDs, to migrate my data from old HDDs and to buy periodically new tape drives, to migrate my data from tape formats that become obsolete.

jmclnx• 5 months ago

The big question, is it patented to the point were no one can buy the burners and media ?

Will it run on Linux ?

misswaterfairy• 5 months ago

They're definitely pursuing patents...

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.

HPsquared3• 5 months ago

20 year patent lifespan seems like nothing to the overall lifespan of this invention though.

nandomrumber• 5 months ago

Or, next year I can buy ten for five dollars off AliExpress.

vasco• 5 months ago

Yeah but then 1000 years from now nobody will have the right USB cable to read it.

I think we should stick to proven solutions for millennia-robust information storage and paint it on walls inside pyramids.

stackghost2• 5 months ago

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.

userbinator5• 5 months ago

You could "bootstrap" all the information required to produce the hardware to read this, by starting with human-readable instructions for the next step.

dguest• 5 months ago

What language will humans be reading in 10,000 years?

kbelder• 5 months ago

Sector zero should describe how to implement a simple FORTH...

Aardwolf• 5 months ago

You don't necessarily need the same hardware to read it, just like you can read a vinyl record optically without a needle

dyauspitr5• 5 months ago

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.

hulitu4• 5 months ago

but then 1000 years from now the quantum computer, developed by Microsoft, would not need cables.

ksec2• 5 months ago

4.84TB in a single slab of glass, (the slabs are 12 cm x 12 cm and 0.2 cm thick).

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.

Karliss• 5 months ago

It is already way beyond double layer. The 4.8TB is achieved using 301 layers.

ksec2• 5 months ago

There goes my hope of non-cloud backup. I was thinking 1TB doesn't quite make it. Or at least I need a dozens of these.

rarisma• 5 months ago

I swear this happens at least once a year.

Wheres my futuristic storage guys?

winrid• 5 months ago

in your hands :)

lofaszvanitt2• 5 months ago

If you watch the movie johnny mnemonic, they throw around data cubes the size of a stamp. Modern nvme ssds weigh around 4 grams per TB. So we've already achieved scifi movie parity :D. The only problem is the price.

quinndexter• 5 months ago

I'm a little bit old. When I ordered my first M.2 drive, I had never seen one IRL. I'd assumed about RAM-stick size. Nope! Thumb-sized! The future is amazing! So... give it enough time and eventually the mundane will scratch that itch, I guess?

idiotsecant3• 5 months ago

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!

tbrownaw• 5 months ago

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.

TacticalCoder• 5 months ago

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.

lencastre• 5 months ago

given a long enough period, glass is a fluid, i.e. viscosity

sandbach• 5 months ago

Not at low temperatures.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-fiction-glas...

dyauspitr5• 5 months ago

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.

[1] https://e6cvd.com/us/material/single-crystalline.html?utm_so...

idiotsecant3• 5 months ago

This is mostly a myth based on some medieval glass panels that had structurally wider bases. This material is going to take until the heat death of the universe to deform 1mm at room temperature. I'm sure it'll be fine for way longer than it will take for the data to fail in a different way.

gigel82• 5 months ago

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).

pyrex2026• 5 months ago

is pyrex a public stock

wowczarek• 5 months ago

Corning is. As to pyrex, that depends: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45310995

adrianN• 5 months ago

How much cheaper is it compared to those orbs you can get from the Long Now Foundation?

canterburry• 5 months ago

Very impressive new format. 10,000 years...wow. That's great.

Now, can someone please help me get some data of this Iomega ZIPdrive disc?

micw• 5 months ago

10k years ... Or until it's dropped...

avadodin• 5 months ago

You inserted it at the wrong angle, lol.

Alifatisk• 5 months ago

I swear I’ve read similar headline multiple times for the past decade. This can’t be new.

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...

wumms3• 5 months ago

They mention it in the article:

Microsoft began to build on their work in 2017. Although Kazansky’s approach maximizes durability and the density of data, in the latest work, Microsoft has gone for practicality. They explore a method that enables data to be written faster and decoded more reliably than did Project Silica’s previous iterations, says Black, and it uses cheaper borosilicate glass, rather than harder-to-make fused silica.

Following your link, I found a prototype of the media storage system (2023) with just 2828 views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnK-uB4OsgU

adrian_b6• 5 months ago

They report now significant progresses in writing speed, data density, and also in cost, in comparison with their prototypes from a few years ago.

Unlike before, at the current performance this kind of optical storage could have actually been used in practice, had the writing lasers not been so expensive.

For a given amount of data, such glass slabs, which have the size of CD cases, would occupy a volume of about half of that required for the highest-capacity HDDs and about the same as tape cartriges.

The writing speed is similar with the file downloading speed over the Internet from most sources that throttle their connections, instead of allowing full speed.

Razengan• 5 months ago

DNA?

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?

alfiedotwtf• 5 months ago

I don’t trust my Kodak Gold CDs that advertised 40 years, let alone humans to not self annihilate within the next 400 years.

In fact, look what we’re doing right now with all our past’s relics!

theAdminWave• 5 months ago

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.

Cool tech though :)

baxtr• 5 months ago

Agreed. On the other hand: didn’t any cool tech start as a overpriced, oversized version of its later breakthrough product?

stanac• 5 months ago

It doesn't have to be consumer hardware to be economically viable. I can imagine something like this replacing or complementing tape storage at data centers. We already have hard drives filled with gas for dust-proofing. For archival storage it does not have to be fast (in terms of latency) it just needs to be reliable with high data density.

Hard drives where the size of a car decades ago, we could now have archival storage of the same physical size that can hold petabytes (just guessing, didn't do the actual math).

fragmede• 5 months ago

The question is how much are readers. If I have to take my data to my local strip mall to write my datacube, but this data cube can be read with a much cheaper reader that I can reasonably believe will be available in 40 years, I could see that as being viable.

jmpman• 5 months ago

I believe the helium in the hard drives allows the heads to fly closer to the platter due to the different Reynolds number, not dust.

zem• 5 months ago

i could swear i've read about prototypes of glass storage all the way back in the 80s. been waiting patiently for it to become an actual product.

inemesitaffia• 5 months ago

NSA Utah Data Centre

zkmon• 5 months ago

Data loses its usefulness and relevance with time. Unless it's updatable, just archiving is not going to be useful. Just like how we don't find some 2000 years old writings any useful now, except for museum storage.

b0rtb0rt• 5 months ago

pretty sure there are a few 2000 year old texts that people are still reading today

bubblewand• 5 months ago

Pretty sure the oldest stuff I've read was around 4,500 years old (in translation, but still). Volume I of Lichtheim's Ancient Egyptian Literature.

There are a couple incomplete tales in that 3-volume work and I really wish they'd had a more stable storage medium, because now I'm stuck with accidental millennia-old cliffhangers.

bossyTeacher• 5 months ago

The Bible doesn't count

adrian_b6• 5 months ago

You do not find 2000 years old writings useful, presumably because you have not read any, or at most some bad translations.

I find old writings extremely useful, including many of those that are 2500 years old or even older. The really useful old writings are those in bilingual editions, which allow you to skim quickly in English through passages in which you are not interested at the moment, but then allow you to read the original language to see what the author really meant. Most English translations are very bad when you have a scientific interest in the meaning of the text, because the translators are usually completely ignorant about mathematics, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, biology, technologies and so on, so they fail to translate correctly anything that includes words with special meanings in those domains.

Unfortunately, nowadays fewer people read old writings, which is obvious in the deluge of publications that claim that various new things have been discovered or invented, but those supposedly "new" things are old things that were well known decades or even centuries earlier. Worse, the "new" things usually were not only known previously, but previously better alternatives were already known which are ignored by the "inventors" of the "new" things.

It is well known, or it should be well known, that the space of solutions for many technical problems contains a finite number of alternatives, among which at a given time one is the best. However, which is the best changes in time, depending on the evolution of technologies in other domains. Over a long enough time interval, it is frequent that the optimum solution cycles through all alternatives, going back to a solution that had been preferred a long time before, but which had then been abandoned for some time.

2500 years old writings do not provide detailed solutions for present problems, e.g. how to design the schematics for the power supply of a laser. Nevertheless, they may still provide logical thinking frameworks that are as valid today as they were millennia ago, and they also show the original form of various concepts that have evolved through time until their current form. Understanding the reasons why certain things have evolved through history is essential for understanding in which direction they should be changed today.

Those who believe that we are today better in all domains in comparison with our ancestors from 2000 years ago, are delusional. I consider a few of the laws that were valid in certain ancient societies as greatly superior to the laws that have replaced them in most modern countries.

(An example is that there are now a lot of countries that claim to be "republics", not to mention a certain US party. All such claims are lies, because today there exists no republic on Earth. The principle on which the Roman Republic was grounded, and which distinguished it from other forms of government, was that, with temporary exceptions for emergencies like wars, plagues or natural calamities, no important public executive function should be occupied by a single human, but only by 2 or more humans with equal power, so that the abuse attempts of 1 of them would be stopped by the others. There are also examples in more rational and more efficient penal systems, which did not include stupid punishment methods, like prison, but where any non-irreversible kind of damage (e.g. theft, fraud, non-permanent bodily harm) was punished by a fine, but not by a fine equal to the damage, but by a fine that was a big multiple of the damage from double to 10 times, to discourage such acts.)

hulitu4• 5 months ago

Data loses its usefulness and relevance with time. Unless it's updatable,

Why do you think there is a new GTK release every couple of years ? Or a new rust compiler release every couple of months ?

thaumasiotes• 5 months ago

We've had data storage that lasts for millennia for several thousand years already. The invention of millennia-long storage more or less coincided with the invention of writing.

There isn't really a benefit. Our durably-stored several-thousand-year-old records suffer from various problems:

- They're hard to understand.

- They tend not to be relevant to much.

- Most of them have gotten lost. They're not gone, but it would be extremely expensive to find them.

Interestingly, these are the same problems that occur with stored data of much more recent vintage. But they get worse and worse over time, and the fact that the storage medium itself doesn't degrade does nothing to help. It tends to make those usability problems worse by giving people a false sense of security that the data is still there, until the cost of recovering it becomes too great and for practical purposes it isn't there anymore.

If something matters, it will be stored on ephemeral media and recopied over time onto more ephemeral media.

hilbert42• 5 months ago

It's good to know people are finally working on long-term nonvolatile storage. To date, just about every storage syatem we've developed has had a storter lifespan than the previous one, NAND versus magnetic storage for instance.

The idea isn't new of course, just think back to Dave removing HAL's glass/crystal memory modules in 2001. Clarke/Kubrick were thinking along those lines in the 1960s.

jrflowers• 5 months ago

I like that they call it a “deployable archival system” that kind of sounds like they’ve invented a laser that can read/write this stuff that can last for 10,000 years

i7l• 5 months ago

Clay tablets?

Microsoft team creates data-storage system that lasts for millennia

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