Microsoft makes glass hard drives that last 10,000 years

Microsoft's glass hard drive project called Silica was tested by the company four years ago. The advantage of recording data on glass is that it is not damaged and can be preserved for up to 10,000 years without needing to be copied again.

Microsoft makes glass hard drives that last 10,000 years Picture 1 Microsoft makes glass hard drives that last 10,000 years Picture 1

Microsoft hopes to build data centers with glass hard drives in the future. This center will operate using a robotic system.

To record data, engineers will use super-fast femtosecond lasers to create voxels - 3D versions of pixels. The computer will control the microscopes to read and decode voxels.

Microsoft makes glass hard drives that last 10,000 years Picture 2 Microsoft makes glass hard drives that last 10,000 years Picture 2

Another special feature of glass hard drives is that the storage system does not consume power. Instead of connecting to the Internet in real time, the glass plate placed on the shelf, the robots will move to the glass block containing the data the user wants to access and transfer it to the reader to decode and send it.

Microsoft makes glass hard drives that last 10,000 years Picture 3 Microsoft makes glass hard drives that last 10,000 years Picture 3

Currently, Microsoft can store several TB of data, 1.75 million songs or 3,500 movies on a single glass plate.

Microsoft said the Silica project is considered to have a lot of potential but is still in the development stage. The initial cost of the project is very high, most of it is for recording data on glass, but maintenance costs are much cheaper than current storage centers.

In the future, glass storage technology will become the foundation of the global Azure storage center.