Your storage is guaranteed to die at some point, no matter what protections and precautions you take. That is, unless you switch to Microsoft’s Project Silica, a frankly outlandish storage system that writes your data to an ultra-thin sheet of glass, written to by a laser.
In development since 2019, Project Silica sounds like something straight out of sci-fi, but it could be closer to your PC than this crazy idea actually sounds.
Project Silica wants to store your memories in laser-etched glass
“Lasers”
Conceptually, Project Silica is wild. You basically have ultra-fast lasers that fire short pulses into ordinary glass (yes — more on this in a moment), where it leaves behind microscopic 3D dots called voxels. The voxels sit inside the glass, rather than on top of it, enabling hundreds of voxels to be stacked at pixel-width sizes, while the glass plate itself is only around 2mm thick.
Now, there are two ways to make those dots. One changes how light passes through each spot and needs just a single laser pulse. The other carves tiny stretched-out voids that can hold more than one bit each, which helps the older glass reach a higher capacity. Because each dot holds more than one bit, larger groups combine into symbols, and software on your device tells the laser what to carve.
Then, a camera system reads the voxels back, making the data the laser imparts in each voxel readable. The camera takes a picture of each layer, then feeds that information back to a neural network specifically designed to work out what each voxel imprint means.
With the single-pulse dots, neighbors blur into each other in three dimensions, so Microsoft uses a machine learning model to cope with that blur. The newest reader needs one camera instead of three or four, which makes it smaller and cheaper.
This advance addresses key barriers to commercialization: cost and availability of storage media. 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.
Early Project Silica versions only worked with fused silica, which is both difficult to make and expensive, not to mention it only comes from a few suppliers. Microsoft’s development team later found a way to use borosilicate, the same glass you’ll find in your kitchen cookware (like Pyrex) and your oven door.
The switch to the cheaper glass means that Project Silica is closer to reality than we think, bringing costs down dramatically. It’s also another factor in what could see this storage type hold onto your data for 10,000 years.
What “10,000 years” really means
You’ll be waiting up real late
Of course, putting the 10,000-year claim to actual test is impossible, unless Microsoft has accidentally revealed it’s cracked time-travel while making this new storage type. I don’t think that’s the case, somehow.
Instead, Microsoft used accelerated aging tests, which stress the glass in a lab to see how it holds up, then projected the results forward.
According to an article in Nature, Microsoft projects that the data should remain stable for more than 10,000 years at room temperature. Again, impossible for us to actually test or confirm.
Once we finish writing the glass and move it to the library, we design the system so it can never go back to the writer. It’s completely immutable.
What might be more interesting, though, is that Microsoft ran a bunch of other tests against Project Silica, and it still came out unscathed. Microsoft says glass resists water, heat, and dust, and back in early testing in 2019, it put the earlier quartz glass through boiling, steel wool, and a microwave without damaging the data.
The project’s research director, Richard Black, has called Silica’s written data “immutable”, and Microsoft’s prototype library enforces that with a one-way path, so a plate can’t be overwritten once it’s written.
Perfect for any data archive, but probably hell on earth for anything you’d want to edit later. Unless, of course, you just take the platter and smash it into millions of microscopic pieces, similar to how we deal with ultra-secure data deletion now.
Glass is good, but how fast is it?
And more importantly, when can we use it?
That’s the other interesting part of Project Silica. Microsoft’s testing pushed its glass storage to speeds between 18.4 and 65.9 megabits per second (around 8MB/s), using four lasers to write. That’s not massively fast compared to modern storage solutions, with a top-end PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD pushing speeds beyond 10,000MB/s in ideal conditions. It even managed to store the 1978 Superman movie on one of its glass sheets — taking up 75.6GB of storage, so perhaps it’s not the most practical in that sense, either.
On that, you won’t be swapping out your NVMe for a sheet of glass any time soon, at least not to find those marginal boot time gains.
However, usage is another question entirely. Microsoft researched Project Silica for years, but eventually published its final paper, suggesting that it’s done with glass-based storage, at least for now. Given that it appears to have successfully fired lasers at sheet-thin glass and everything worked out, I’m a little disappointed, but the research is very much there for someone else to build on.