Glass storage
Experimental archival storage that encodes data as structural changes inside glass for very long-duration, read-mostly retention.
Glass archival research (Microsoft Project Silica is the best-known public program) encodes data inside durable quartz/fused silica using ultrafast femtosecond lasers that write volumetric voxels, then reads with polarization-sensitive microscopy. The media is write-once (WORM) by design: read optics lack the energy to rewrite the glass, and library mechanics can keep plates out of writers for an air-gap archive. Public materials describe research prototypes and demonstrators (including cloud-library concepts), not a general retail glass-drive SKU line. Scope is long-horizon archival media exploration alongside tape and optical disc—capacity, write rate, and lifetime figures must be taken from the cited research papers, not secondary marketing summaries.
Relations
- related
- optical-archival, hot-warm-cold
Advantages
- Demonstrated multi-layer writes in silica with no moving media during read.
Limitations
- Not a shipping general-purpose replacement for tape or HDD at datacenter scale.