Microsoft's Project Silica is now a cloud garage answer

Recap: It's been almost 4 years considering we first heard about Project Silica, a Microsoft Research mission tasked with storing virtual records on sheets of glass. At the time, Microsoft become able to successfully save a copy of Superman (1978) on a piece of glass more or less the dimensions of a drink coaster.

The generation has superior considerably when you consider that then, to the point that it is able to now store upwards of 7 TB of data and keep it for around 10,000 years. Put any other way, a unmarried glass plate can save kind of three,500 movies – sufficient to watch non-prevent for over 1/2 a 12 months – or approximately 1.75 million songs (about thirteen years' worth of music).

Microsoft is also repositioning the mission as a cloud storage solution in place of an avenue of garage designed particularly for leisure groups, and additionally as a sustainable garage solution.

Magnetic media has a finite lifetime that means that after a set wide variety of years, statistics saved on tape drives will want to be copied over to a brand new pressure to make certain it persists. That gets highly-priced ultimately, and it is not exactly brilliant for the environment either.

With Project Silica, information is written to glass the use of a laser machine and is encoded the usage of voxels, or 3D pixels. When information wishes to be examine, a pc-managed short-shifting microscope gathers the facts that is then exceeded alongside to AI for decoding.

Glass is a long way extra resilient than magnetic media and might get up to environmental risks like water, intense temperatures, and even floor scratches. Microsoft has even advanced a hello-tech robotic that could mechanically locate and retrieve glass panels when records is known as upon, although the robot does introduce an entire new set of failure factors that want to be weighed.

Microsoft nevertheless has lots of work to do earlier than Project Silica is prepared for high time. Experts inform the enterprise that three-four greater developmental tiers are wanted earlier than the tech is ready for industrial use.