Microsoft scientists invent tiny glass ‘books’ that could store data for millennia

Robot libraries filled with tiny glass ‘books’ could store data for millennia

By Damien Pin

A Microsoft Research team combined lasers, machine learning and tiny glass rectangles to demonstrate a new robotic data storage system that could, in theory, still be readable in 10,000 years, or twice as long as humans have been writing things so far. The process, recently described in Nature, is designed to archive records that do not need to be accessed often, such as certain climate measurements, historical records, and other reference materials. If scaled, this technology could one day store mountains of humanity’s accumulated knowledge in glass libraries.

“This is an exciting and very promising development,” says Doris Möncke, a glass chemist and associate professor of glass science at Alfred University in New York state, who was not involved in the study. “They certainly went further than anything I’ve seen at glass conferences recently.”

The new system can write, read and store 4.8 terabytes of data in a tiny piece of glass with an area of ​​12 square centimeters and a thickness of two millimeters. It packs so much information into such a small space by etching 301 layers of three-dimensional, pixel-like holes called voxels stacked on top of each other. To record information, a laser transfers the data into precise depths of the glass using a series of energy pulses that each last about a quadrillionth of a second. Filling the glass “book” with data requires 48.9 kilojoules of energy, or about the calories in half a Brussels sprout. Since the data is stacked, reading a single layer is a bit complex; a microscope focuses on each layer of the glass and the resulting images are processed by machine learning to determine the corresponding symbols.

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Data systems can introduce errors when reading or writing, or even during storage, so a portion of the glass book’s storage space is dedicated to correcting errors. The researchers tested how much extra space was needed to reliably read and write a sector in the glass and determined that different locations required different levels of redundancy.

To determine how long the data stored in the glass could be readable, the team heated it in an oven at increasing temperatures up to 500 degrees Celsius, then measured how light passed through the glass to see how it changed. Extrapolation of the data indicated that the glass books would remain stable at 290 degrees Celsius for more than 10,000 years, and even longer at room temperature.

Möncke expects the new glass to have “great longevity” as long as it is not melted, broken or “forgotten in a damp cellar”. She had previously studied radiation damage to glass, and the glass showed structural changes 10 to 20 years after the damage. But the defects weren’t cavities like those etched to record data. “I think these cavities are indeed stable in the long term,” says Möncke, because the laser writing process causes more permanent changes to the glass, the Microsoft research team said. And because the cavities are contained within the glass rather than exposed to the outside world, they’re less likely to cause cracking, she adds, although “it’s certainly worth a long-term study!” »

The new research did not take into account mechanical stress or corrosion as part of longevity testing, and both of these are likely to affect the readability of data over a long period of time. Additionally, for the data to be readable over centuries, each person or robot handling the glass must avoid accidentally losing it or confusing it with an element of a futuristic game of dominoes.

Either way, the technology could be a big improvement over current archival storage systems, such as hard drives, which can last a decade or two before needing replacement. DNA, which can be used as a dense and efficient archive, is also being developed, although it is much more difficult to extract data from this medium.

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