Robot library filled with tiny glass ‘books’ could store data for millennia
Glass blocks etched with lasers could provide permanent data storage, a study from Microsoft Research shows
A piece of glass on which a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator map data is encoded.
A team at Microsoft Research combined lasers, machine learning and tiny glass rectangles for the demonstration A new robotic data storage system In theory, it could still be readable 10,000 years from now – twice as long as humans have been writing things down. process, recently described Nature, Designed to store records that do not need to be accessed frequently, such as some climate measurements, historical records and other reference materials. If scaled, the technology could someday store mountains of humanity’s accumulated knowledge in libraries made of glass.
“This is an exciting and very promising development,” says Doris MonkEA glass chemist and an associate professor of glass science at Alfred University in New York state, who were not involved in the study. “They certainly went far beyond anything I’ve seen at recent Glass conventions.”
The new system can write, read and store 4.8 terabytes of data in a tiny piece of glass with a surface 12 centimeters square and a thickness of two millimeters. It crams a lot of information into such a small space by stacking 301 layers of three-dimensional pixel-like holes, called voxels, on top of each other. To record information, a laser zaps data into the glass at a precise depth using a series of energy pulses, lasting about a quarter of a second. Filling the glass “book” with data required 48.9 kilojoules of energy, or the calories contained in half a Brussels sprout. Because the data is stacked, reading a layer is a bit complicated; A microscope focuses on each layer in the glass, and the resulting images are processed with machine learning to determine matching symbols.
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Closeup of the equipment that allows researchers to encode data onto small pieces of glass.
Data systems can also introduce errors when reading or writing, or during storage, so some of the Glass Book’s storage space is dedicated to error correction. The researchers tested how much extra space was needed to reliably read and write a sector in Glass and determined that different locations required different levels of redundancy.
To find out how long data stored in the glass could remain readable, the team heated it in a furnace at increasing temperatures up to 500 degrees Celsius and then measured it as light passed through the glass to see how it changed. Extrapolating data indicates that the glass books will remain stable at 290 degrees Celsius for more than 10,000 years – and even longer at room temperature.
Monke expects the new glass to have “high longevity” as long as it is not melted, broken or “forgotten in a damp basement”. He had previously studied radiation damage on glass, and that glass had shown changes in structure 10 to 20 years after the damage occurred. But faults weren’t like cavities dug to record data. “I believe those cavities are actually stable long-term,” Monke says, because the laser writing process causes more permanent changes in the glass, says the Microsoft research team. And because the cavities are within the glass rather than exposed to the outside world, they are less likely to crack, she adds, although “it’s definitely worth studying in the long run!”
The new research does not include mechanical stress or corrosion as part of the longevity testing, and both are likely to affect the readability of data over long periods of time. Furthermore, to keep the data readable for centuries, every person or robot that ever handles the glass must avoid accidentally losing it or mistaking it for part of a future domino set.
Regardless, the technology could be a major improvement over existing archival storage systems, such as hard drives, which can last a decade or two before needing replacement. DNA that can be used as a dense, efficient archive is also under development, although extracting data through that means is far more challenging.
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