- It takes more than 18 days to write an entire 4.8 TB glass disk. far too slow for daily operation
- Cheaper borosilicate glass reduces costs but cannot solve practical limitations
- Microsoft’s statement signals closure rather than a commitment to future development
Microsoft has offered a fresh update to Project Silica, its long-running effort to store digital information inside sheets of glass for centuries.
The company says new research published in Nature shows that borosilicate glass – similar to the material used in oven doors and Pyrex glassware – can store data much longer than conventional archive systems such as HDD, SSD or magnetic tape.
Laboratory tests suggest a viable lifetime of more than 10,000 years, well beyond the limits of current physical storage media.
New soil with borosilicate glass
The concept relies on femtosecond lasers, which encode data as microscopic three-dimensional structures known as voxels inside the glass.
Previous experiments relied on expensive fused silica, which limited practicality, and stored 4.84 TB per 2 mm thick plate.
Recent work replaces this material with cheaper borosilicate glass while maintaining long-term durability.
Microsoft reported encoding 258 layers of data totaling about 2.02 TB on a 2 mm thick disk.
The company achieved write speeds from 18.4 to 65.9 Mbps, depending on the number of parallel laser beams used.
This peak speed is higher than the 25.6 Mbps previously achieved with fused silica, even though the borosilicate density is less than half that of fused silica.
Durability remains central to the appeal of glass as conventional storage media inevitably degrade.
Microsoft performed accelerated aging tests to simulate long-term decay, and the borosilicate boards remained structurally intact without major loss of encoded data over millennia.
While this technology is fascinating when you look at the practical side, it barely lasts – as it would take about 18.5 days to write a full 4.8 TB disk at 25.6 Mbit/s, about 3 MB/s.
Even the faster speeds of 65.9Mbps are slow for anything other than long-term archives – it could be useful if you want to lock data away for millennia and never access it again, but it’s a small niche and one most companies aren’t willing to invest in on a large scale.
Even with the cheaper borosilicate glass, simplified hardware, and phase-based voxels that reduce complexity, the economics don’t make sense.
You’re still talking about precision lasers, multiple layers of coding and careful calibration.
It’s not just a matter of production costs – the workflow is slow and any mistake can ruin a record that took days to write.
Microsoft isn’t showing much enthusiasm – the future of Project Silica is still unclear, and its fate may already be sealed, as the company’s latest statement on Project Silica reads more like a polite ending than a plan for the future.
“The research phase is now complete and we continue to consider lessons learned from Project Silica as we explore the ongoing need for sustainable, long-term preservation of digital information. We have added this paper to our published works for others to build on,” the company said in a blog post.
That statement suggests the company is closing the chapter while allowing others to continue the work.
There is no hint of scaling, no roadmap for commercialization, and no indication that the company sees a viable market for this technology.
Sharing the research is valuable to the scientific community, but it does not signal internal commitment.
Overall, the language feels like a quiet step back, making it reasonable to assume that Project Silica will never move beyond the lab.
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