A scientist working on Project Silica, trying to read data from the glass medium
With the increase in resolution of videos and the proliferation of IoT networks, there's an urgent need for data storage devices with greater capacities. However, the rate at which current storage technologies are growing may not be enough. To that end, companies like Microsoft, Seagate, and Western Digital are looking into optical data storage with glass as a medium.
According to TechRadar (via IEEE Explore), one of the earliest proof of concepts for glass a medium emerged last year. In November 2019, Microsoft's Project Silica team unveiled a glass storage device that contained the 1978 Superman movie, which is said that have 75.6GB of data and error-correcting code. In other words, think of it as a fancier and thicker version of a Blu-ray disc.
Project Silica's proof of concept had 75.6GB of data stored inside
While Blu-ray discs can be rewritable, researchers haven't been able to do so with the new glass medium. However, it does seem like it'll have a far larger capacity compared to Blu-ray, as you can tell from the example given above. Researchers have claimed that a DVD-sized disc, using a piece of glass of 2mm in thickness, could store up to 360TB of data.
Of course, all of these is still in the research phase and we have no idea when we'll start seeing actual consumer products. Having said that, don't you think rewritable storage drives like that would be revolutionary? Share your thoughts with us on our Facebook page and stay tuned to TechNave.com for more interesting news.
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