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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Microsoft team creates data-storage system that lasts for millennia
jrflowers wrote 2 hours 37 min ago:
I like that they call it a âdeployable archival systemâ that kind
of sounds like theyâve invented a laser that can read/write this
stuff that can last for 10,000 years
hilbert42 wrote 10 hours 2 min ago:
It's good to know people are finally working on long-term nonvolatile
storage. To date, just about every storage syatem we've developed has
had a storter lifespan than the previous one, NAND versus magnetic
storage for instance.
The idea isn't new of course, just think back to Dave removing HAL's
glass/crystal memory modules in 2001. Clarke/Kubrick were thinking
along those lines in the 1960s.
thaumasiotes wrote 16 hours 16 min ago:
We've had data storage that lasts for millennia for several thousand
years already. The invention of millennia-long storage more or less
coincided with the invention of writing.
There isn't really a benefit. Our durably-stored
several-thousand-year-old records suffer from various problems:
- They're hard to understand.
- They tend not to be relevant to much.
- Most of them have gotten lost. They're not gone, but it would be
extremely expensive to find them.
Interestingly, these are the same problems that occur with stored data
of much more recent vintage. But they get worse and worse over time,
and the fact that the storage medium itself doesn't degrade does
nothing to help. It tends to make those usability problems worse by
giving people a false sense of security that the data is still there,
until the cost of recovering it becomes too great and for practical
purposes it isn't there anymore.
If something matters, it will be stored on ephemeral media and recopied
over time onto more ephemeral media.
zkmon wrote 16 hours 23 min ago:
Data loses its usefulness and relevance with time. Unless it's
updatable, just archiving is not going to be useful. Just like how we
don't find some 2000 years old writings any useful now, except for
museum storage.
adrian_b wrote 2 hours 33 min ago:
You do not find 2000 years old writings useful, presumably because
you have not read any, or at most some bad translations.
I find old writings extremely useful, including many of those that
are 2500 years old or even older. The really useful old writings are
those in bilingual editions, which allow you to skim quickly in
English through passages in which you are not interested at the
moment, but then allow you to read the original language to see what
the author really meant. Most English translations are very bad when
you have a scientific interest in the meaning of the text, because
the translators are usually completely ignorant about mathematics,
physics, chemistry, mineralogy, biology, technologies and so on, so
they fail to translate correctly anything that includes words with
special meanings in those domains.
Unfortunately, nowadays fewer people read old writings, which is
obvious in the deluge of publications that claim that various new
things have been discovered or invented, but those supposedly "new"
things are old things that were well known decades or even centuries
earlier. Worse, the "new" things usually were not only known
previously, but previously better alternatives were already known
which are ignored by the "inventors" of the "new" things.
It is well known, or it should be well known, that the space of
solutions for many technical problems contains a finite number of
alternatives, among which at a given time one is the best. However,
which is the best changes in time, depending on the evolution of
technologies in other domains. Over a long enough time interval, it
is frequent that the optimum solution cycles through all
alternatives, going back to a solution that had been preferred a long
time before, but which had then been abandoned for some time.
2500 years old writings do not provide detailed solutions for present
problems, e.g. how to design the schematics for the power supply of a
laser. Nevertheless, they may still provide logical thinking
frameworks that are as valid today as they were millennia ago, and
they also show the original form of various concepts that have
evolved through time until their current form. Understanding the
reasons why certain things have evolved through history is essential
for understanding in which direction they should be changed today.
Those who believe that we are today better in all domains in
comparison with our ancestors from 2000 years ago, are delusional. I
consider a few of the laws that were valid in certain ancient
societies as greatly superior to the laws that have replaced them in
most modern countries.
(An example is that there are now a lot of countries that claim to be
"republics", not to mention a certain US party. All such claims are
lies, because today there exists no republic on Earth. The principle
on which the Roman Republic was grounded, and which distinguished it
from other forms of government, was that, with temporary exceptions
for emergencies like wars, plagues or natural calamities, no
important public executive function should be occupied by a single
human, but only by 2 or more humans with equal power, so that the
abuse attempts of 1 of them would be stopped by the others. There are
also examples in more rational and more efficient penal systems,
which did not include stupid punishment methods, like prison, but
where any non-irreversible kind of damage (e.g. theft, fraud,
non-permanent bodily harm) was punished by a fine, but not by a fine
equal to the damage, but by a fine that was a big multiple of the
damage from double to 10 times, to discourage such acts.)
b0rtb0rt wrote 15 hours 50 min ago:
pretty sure there are a few 2000 year old texts that people are still
reading today
bossyTeacher wrote 14 hours 17 min ago:
The Bible doesn't count
bubblewand wrote 15 hours 29 min ago:
Pretty sure the oldest stuff I've read was around 4,500 years old
(in translation, but still). Volume I of Lichtheim's Ancient
Egyptian Literature.
There are a couple incomplete tales in that 3-volume work and I
really wish they'd had a more stable storage medium, because now
I'm stuck with accidental millennia-old cliffhangers.
theAdminWave wrote 1 day ago:
LOL I've done holographic data storage in borosilicate glass using fs
laser pulses for my masters thesis in physics more than a decade ago
and guess what, this is not going anywhere. The claims are all wildly
exaggerated also. Lots of buzzwords micro nano plasma explosions but
the truth is hidden in the details: needs specialist hardware... Yeah
like a 50.000 USD femto second laser setup that needs an entire
basement and you wearing ski googles at all times to not get blind type
of specialist hardware. Guess we're all gonna put that in our living
rooms, won't we?
And the storage density is limited by all kinds of effects that I won't
even get into it but you can roughly assume its at best half or even
less of that and then it starts becoming much less impressive.
Yes you can microwave a slab of glass or go diving with it and it will
still be intact but unless we make machines that read and store data
much more easily, like significantly absurdly more easily, this is the
biggest pipe dream of them all.
Cool tech though :)
inemesitaffia wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
NSA Utah Data Centre
zem wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
i could swear i've read about prototypes of glass storage all the way
back in the 80s. been waiting patiently for it to become an actual
product.
stanac wrote 17 hours 12 min ago:
It doesn't have to be consumer hardware to be economically viable. I
can imagine something like this replacing or complementing tape
storage at data centers. We already have hard drives filled with gas
for dust-proofing. For archival storage it does not have to be fast
(in terms of latency) it just needs to be reliable with high data
density.
Hard drives where the size of a car decades ago, we could now have
archival storage of the same physical size that can hold petabytes
(just guessing, didn't do the actual math).
jmpman wrote 7 hours 8 min ago:
I believe the helium in the hard drives allows the heads to fly
closer to the platter due to the different Reynolds number, not
dust.
fragmede wrote 15 hours 44 min ago:
The question is how much are readers. If I have to take my data to
my local strip mall to write my datacube, but this data cube can be
read with a much cheaper reader that I can reasonably believe will
be available in 40 years, I could see that as being viable.
baxtr wrote 17 hours 15 min ago:
Agreed. On the other hand: didnât any cool tech start as a
overpriced, oversized version of its later breakthrough product?
alfiedotwtf wrote 1 day ago:
I donât trust my Kodak Gold CDs that advertised 40 years, let alone
humans to not self annihilate within the next 400 years.
In fact, look what weâre doing right now with all our pastâs
relics!
Razengan wrote 1 day ago:
DNA?
Something I've always wondered.. could things like tree rings, or
birdsong and other mating rituals (the species can survive only by
replicating the sequences) be used for "data storage" by some
hypothetical intelligences that think on scales of thousands of years?
Alifatisk wrote 1 day ago:
I swear Iâve read similar headline multiple times for the past
decade. This canât be new.
I thought I was experiencing some Mandela affect, had to Bing it. This
is from 2022
HTML [1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/project-silica-...
adrian_b wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
They report now significant progresses in writing speed, data
density, and also in cost, in comparison with their prototypes from a
few years ago.
Unlike before, at the current performance this kind of optical
storage could have actually been used in practice, had the writing
lasers not been so expensive.
For a given amount of data, such glass slabs, which have the size of
CD cases, would occupy a volume of about half of that required for
the highest-capacity HDDs and about the same as tape cartriges.
The writing speed is similar with the file downloading speed over the
Internet from most sources that throttle their connections, instead
of allowing full speed.
wumms wrote 22 hours 33 min ago:
They mention it in the article:
> Microsoft began to build on their work in 2017. Although
Kazanskyâs approach maximizes durability and the density of data,
in the latest work, Microsoft has gone for practicality. They explore
a method that enables data to be written faster and decoded more
reliably than did Project Silicaâs previous iterations, says Black,
and it uses cheaper borosilicate glass, rather than harder-to-make
fused silica.
Following your link, I found a prototype of the media storage system
(2023) with just 2828 views:
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnK-uB4OsgU
micw wrote 1 day ago:
10k years ... Or until it's dropped...
avadodin wrote 1 day ago:
You inserted it at the wrong angle, lol.
canterburry wrote 1 day ago:
Very impressive new format. 10,000 years...wow. That's great.
Now, can someone please help me get some data of this Iomega ZIPdrive
disc?
adrianN wrote 1 day ago:
How much cheaper is it compared to those orbs you can get from the Long
Now Foundation?
pyrex2026 wrote 1 day ago:
is pyrex a public stock
wowczarek wrote 15 hours 48 min ago:
Corning is. As to pyrex, that depends:
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45310995
gigel82 wrote 1 day ago:
I have read a variation of this headline once every 2 years since the
early 2000s, yet never seen it turn into something real (that a
consumer / enterprise can buy).
idiotsecant wrote 1 day ago:
Glass is one of the more stable things we can make. This seems pretty
good! I don't have an application that requires ten thousand years of
storage but I'm sure someone out there does!
lencastre wrote 1 day ago:
given a long enough period, glass is a fluid, i.e. viscosity
idiotsecant wrote 22 hours 26 min ago:
This is mostly a myth based on some medieval glass panels that had
structurally wider bases. This material is going to take until the
heat death of the universe to deform 1mm at room temperature. I'm
sure it'll be fine for way longer than it will take for the data to
fail in a different way.
dyauspitr wrote 1 day ago:
You can get a 6mmx6mmx1.2mm pure industrial diamond sheet for about
$1000 [1]. That should be able to hold around 300 GB with this
method and would last practically forever.
HTML [1]: https://e6cvd.com/us/material/single-crystalline.html?utm_...
userbinator wrote 5 hours 59 min ago:
?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Seriously?
sandbach wrote 1 day ago:
Not at low temperatures.
HTML [1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-fiction-gl...
tbrownaw wrote 1 day ago:
> I don't have an application that requires ten thousand years of
storage but I'm sure someone out there does!
A) record (a representative cross-section of) "everything" and leave
multiple copies where future archeologists might find it. To avoid
things like how present-day archaeologists apparently have holes in
the kinds of things they can find, due to different social classes
not leaving equally-robust trails.
B) this is "at least as long as I could possibly care about" storage.
If I need to retain say financial records for seven years, and then
later the government retroactively increases that to 20 years,
there's no need to re-archive it all onto new media.
TacticalCoder wrote 1 day ago:
> B) this is "at least as long as I could possibly care about"
storage. If I need to retain say financial records for seven years,
and then later the government retroactively increases that to 20
years, there's no need to re-archive it all onto new media.
In many countries this "maximum (6 or) 7 years" for financial
records is only if the local IRS decides that you're not
potentially committing fraud. If they decide you've potentially
committed fraud at any time in the past, there's no limit as to how
far they can go. Even in the US stuff like (some of the) funds
stolen by the Enron scam have been successfully clawed back more
than two decades after the fact.
At least that's the case in several EU countries: there's literally
no limit if the country's IRS equivalent decides you're potentially
committing fraud (or if you did in the past).
Which is insane and totally arbitrary but that's how it is.
In addition to that under a great many KYC/AML excuses, there are
banks out there that shall have zero issue asking you to justify
the "source of funds" and at times I've had to provide info dating
from way more than seven years in the past. I've heard --and I'm
not shitting you-- from someone proving he bought for about 5 K EUR
of something that went up more than 100x (think Bitcoin or some
exceptionally successful stock), that his bank answered something
like: "OK, but now that you've proven you actually made 100x, prove
us the source of the 5 K EUR in 2013!".
That's what happens to a society when you give too much power to
petty people.
There are literally collaborationists out there that are going to
fill SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports) when someone can prove he
turned 5 K into 500 K not on the 500 K (which are impossible to
dispute) but on the 5 K that were used in the first place. That's
how jealous and incompetent some people are in this world.
Things became so bad that I now have a Git versioned repo (and
backups everywhere) where I keep track of, among other, every
single wire transfer above 10 K EUR. I've got stuff dating back to
2001 when I bought my first apartment etc.
Don't underestimate how pathetic and bitter some of the people
you'll have to deal with (be it from your local IRS or a bank) are
going to be.
rarisma wrote 1 day ago:
I swear this happens at least once a year.
Wheres my futuristic storage guys?
quinndexter wrote 4 hours 55 min ago:
I'm a little bit old. When I ordered my first M.2 drive, I had never
seen one IRL. I'd assumed about RAM-stick size. Nope! Thumb-sized!
The future is amazing! So... give it enough time and eventually the
mundane will scratch that itch, I guess?
lofaszvanitt wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
If you watch the movie johnny mnemonic, they throw around data cubes
the size of a stamp. Modern nvme ssds weigh around 4 grams per TB. So
we've already achieved scifi movie parity :D. The only problem is the
price.
winrid wrote 1 day ago:
in your hands :)
ksec wrote 1 day ago:
>4.84TB in a single slab of glass, (the slabs are 12 cm x 12 cm and 0.2
cm thick).
So a rough estimate, at the size of UMD, used in Playstation Portable,
slightly smaller than the size of Mini Disc, it could store 1TB.
I assume we could do double layer in the future for 2TB.
For comparison that is roughly 1000x times the capacity of UMD. I would
love to have this. Burn a few of these as backup and call it a day.
Karliss wrote 1 day ago:
It is already way beyond double layer. The 4.8TB is achieved using
301 layers.
ksec wrote 1 day ago:
There goes my hope of non-cloud backup. I was thinking 1TB doesn't
quite make it. Or at least I need a dozens of these.
adrian_b wrote 2 hours 49 min ago:
The capacity per device is irrelevant.
What matters is the capacity per volume, per mass and per dollar.
The capacities per volume and per mass for these glass slabs are
already very competitive. They are about the same as for the best
tape cartridges currently available. The capacity per volume is
about twice better than for the best HDDs, and the capacity per
mass is much better than that, because HDDs are very heavy.
If such optical storage had not been so expensive as it is for
now, it would have already been much better than any cloud
storage. The slow writing speed is similar to that of file
downloading or uploading over the Internet. Reading can be done
much faster than writing, because it uses ordinary lasers and a
video camera, not the very expensive femtosecond-pulse lasers
used for writing.
vasco wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah but then 1000 years from now nobody will have the right USB cable
to read it.
I think we should stick to proven solutions for millennia-robust
information storage and paint it on walls inside pyramids.
Aardwolf wrote 1 day ago:
You don't necessarily need the same hardware to read it, just like
you can read a vinyl record optically without a needle
dyauspitr wrote 1 day ago:
Depends on what you etch on there. If itâs binary representation
of actual alphabets then sure. If itâs a video file then without
the software to decipher and manipulate the data, it would be
pretty indecipherable. How to read an mp4 is not part of the data
itself.
simicd wrote 1 day ago:
At 4.8TB one could add a header section with the full code,
instructions how to compile it etc. That would certainly help to
reproduce it, assuming civilizations in 10k years still can
decypher todays language.
userbinator wrote 1 day ago:
You could "bootstrap" all the information required to produce the
hardware to read this, by starting with human-readable instructions
for the next step.
dguest wrote 1 day ago:
What language will humans be reading in 10,000 years?
userbinator wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
Pictures.
nubinetwork wrote 8 hours 20 min ago:
20 years ago, I thought Esperanto might be a thing, but nope. :)
adrian_b wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
Esperanto has succeeded to become the best known of the
artificially-constructed languages.
Unfortunately, its creator had only modest knowledge of
linguistics, so there are many features of Esperanto that can
be considered as mistakes, and they have contributed to its
little success.
Some of the artificial languages that have been designed later
are much better than Esperanto, but they have achieved even
less notoriety than it.
What has doomed all artificial languages, despite the fact that
some of them would have been much better than English for
international relations and for the publication of scientific
and technical literature, has been the absolute dominance of
USA over the entire world after the end of WWII.
This unbalanced relationship between USA and everyone else has
forced the use of English both in commercial relations and in
the scientific and technical publications, excluding all
alternatives and replacing not only any artificial languages,
but also the European languages that previously had been more
important than English, i.e. German and French.
cute_boi wrote 9 hours 8 min ago:
With all these climate change and AI, will there be humans in 10k
years?
lofaszvanitt wrote 5 hours 15 min ago:
Yep, on top of trees, fighting for real estate.
stackghost wrote 1 day ago:
If Nanni could have engraved his shitpost about Ea-nasir's copper
into multiple glass tablets, easy to distribute, that would last for
10000 years, he probably would have.
jmclnx wrote 3 days ago:
The big question, is it patented to the point were no one can buy the
burners and media ?
Will it run on Linux ?
misswaterfairy wrote 1 day ago:
They're definitely pursuing patents...
> The authors of the paper have filed several patents relating to the
subject matter contained in this paper in the name of Microsoft
Corporation.
Page 12 of the paper: [1] It's whether Microsoft will be fair and
flexible licensing their patents to third-parties.
Otherwise I'd suggest that if they keep it all to themselves and
charge like a wounded bull, uptake would be quite limited.
At least until the original patents expires, which might be the
better strategic move for third-parties in light of a hostile
Microsoft given how long this archival format is expected to last.
HTML [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10042-w.pdf
nandomrumber wrote 1 day ago:
Or, next year I can buy ten for five dollars off AliExpress.
HPsquared wrote 1 day ago:
20 year patent lifespan seems like nothing to the overall lifespan
of this invention though.
wumms wrote 3 days ago:
Current write speed (No read speed given):
Blu-ray (1Ã) ~36 Mbit/s
MS-Glass (single beam) ~25.6 Mbit/s
MS-Glass (multi-beam) ~65.9 Mbit/s
That's ~7-18 days per 120mm x 120mm medium (4.8TB).
Glass prices stable for now. Also, the authors make no statement about
horizontal vs. vertical storage.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote 1 day ago:
> No read speed given
Write only medium!
adrian_b wrote 3 hours 10 min ago:
The reading is the done with a high-resolution video camera and the
image is processed to extract the data.
This can be easily done many times faster than the writing, which
is why the article is focused on the progress that Microsoft has
achieved in increasing the writing speed, in comparison with their
prototypes from a few years ago. It is also easy to make separate
readers that are much cheaper and smaller than the writers.
The most important limitation of this device is the current very
high cost of the lasers used for writing. Had they been cheaper,
the writing speed could be increased by adding more lasers.
Microsoft argues that if this kind of short-pulse lasers would be
mass produced, they could become much cheaper, like it has happened
with the many lasers that are used now everywhere in optical fiber
communication and with optical discs.
For now. this is a chicken-and-egg problem. This kind of optical
storage cannot be converted into a commercial product because the
lasers are too expensive and the lasers are too expensive because
there is no high-volume market for them.
Even the current level of performance would be enough for myself.
If I could afford such a device, I would buy it instantly, to stop
worrying about having to buy periodically new HDDs, to migrate my
data from old HDDs and to buy periodically new tape drives, to
migrate my data from tape formats that become obsolete.
npodbielski wrote 1 day ago:
At least it is safe for 10k years! And from everybody ever
basically.
NitpickLawyer wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks for digging this up. Every "scientists create new storage
medium" is always a disappointment when you get to see the write
speeds. This seems decent? At least in "raw" numbers there's nothing
obviously making this useless. Let's hope they have a path to quick
commercialisation and make it available. If there's any DC adoption
will be the real test, I think.
thegrim33 wrote 20 hours 0 min ago:
Write speed is probably the least important metric for people that
are considering something like this. After everything with storage
and longevity is taken care of, improving write speeds is a nice to
have, but not the important part.
po1nt wrote 1 day ago:
First CDs would take hour and a half to write with a laser. Once
engineers take over the tech, it will might get faster.
wumms wrote 21 hours 58 min ago:
If they get the read speed up to a couple of GBit/s (~100x
current max write speed), 4.8TB might be a good fit for 32k
movies.
bdbdbdb wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
Of course there are people out there watching 32k movies.
Was 4k not enough?
Am I the only one who's still content with 720p?
stackghost wrote 1 day ago:
>This seems decent?
Definitely. If it actually achieves those speeds it's perfectly
reasonable for long-term/cold storage.
Someone wrote 1 day ago:
Depends somewhat on the read speed, too. Extreme example: if that
is one bit per year, it doesnât matter that you can write stuff
on it.
dyauspitr wrote 1 day ago:
I imagine if you can use lasers to etch at that speed, you can
use them to read at similar speeds as well.
homarp wrote 3 days ago:
also at
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065175
ortusdux wrote 3 days ago:
Any idea why they are reporting the estimated lifespan at 290°C?
Testing seems to have been done at 440°C and above.
idiotsecant wrote 1 day ago:
It's common to perform longevity testing at higher temperatures to
simulate longer lifetimes, in account of nobody has decades of time
to actually perform a 1x time test.
HPsquared wrote 1 day ago:
I wonder if "damp" modes of decay could still damage them though,
which isn't captured in this style of testing. Like some wet
chemical or biological process.
adrian_b wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
Borosilicate glass is much more resistant to chemicals and shocks
than ordinary glass, which is why it is used in glassware for
laboratories and in also in the better cooking vessels.
Except for hydrogen fluoride (a.k.a. hydrofluoric acid) and for
hot and concentrated strong alkalies, biological or chemical
agents will not have effects.
The main danger is either breaking the glass or its
crystallization at high temperatures. A HDD is also unlikely to
survive a drop on a hard floor and high temperatures would
demagnetize it much more easily than affecting a glass stab.
jurgenburgen wrote 1 day ago:
Mechanical decay would also damage them. I think itâs assumed
that the media will be stored in a place protected from humidity,
chemicals and hammers.
HPsquared wrote 1 day ago:
Yes I suppose a strong casing can protect against all that, but
not against temperature so that's the one thing they still need
to test for.
casey2 wrote 3 days ago:
Coz the paper gives a function for extrapolating from these tests.
This is purely testing thermal decay.
10,000 years sounds like a good benchmark and isn't as obviously
ridiculous as saying a million years at 260°C
gnabgib wrote 3 days ago:
Paper [Laser writing in glass for dense, fast and efficient archival
data storage]( [1] )
HTML [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10042-w
DIR <- back to front page