Microsoft has decided its Project Silica storage would be an efficient and sustainable choice for its cloud data centers, with the 7 TB glass media touted to last 10,000 years.
Drop a piece of glass? Why would you design a system where that was physcially possible? Relatively trivial to design a pull-only system where the arm pulls the glass from a storage tray, and gravity makes it physically impossible for the glass to go anywhere but the pull arm. Then the pull arm delivers the glass to the reader which again pulls the glass onto a read device. There's never a need for it to be possible for the glass to fall.
However, breakage is not impossible (earthquake, asteroid hit) which is why all such systems are also designed with redundancies of various strategies, including off-site backups for that asteroid hit.
As described with the stationary slab and complicated write/read equipment, consumers are not getting it. Project Silica seems to be similar to other technologies like the "5D optical / Superman memory crystal".
The industry is reluctant to make a new type of spinning 12 cm optical disc or "hard drive" for consumers. Write-once is certainly less convenient, but ordinary people would definitely do it if they could archive terabytes or hundreds of terabytes with indefinite longevity. It would be nice to store photos, videos, whatever without the relatively high risk of data loss associated with HDDs, SSDs, and CD/DVD/Blu-ray (20-50 years). M-DISC might be the only acceptable option right now, if it works as advertised, but its $/TB is awful.
As described with the stationary slab and complicated write/read equipment, consumers are not getting it. Project Silica seems to be similar to other technologies like the "5D optical / Superman memory crystal".
The industry is reluctant to make a new type of spinning 12 cm optical disc or "hard drive" for consumers. Write-once is certainly less convenient, but ordinary people would definitely do it if they could archive terabytes or hundreds of terabytes with indefinite longevity. It would be nice to store photos, videos, whatever without the relatively high risk of data loss associated with HDDs, SSDs, and CD/DVD/Blu-ray (20-50 years). M-DISC might be the only acceptable option right now, if it works as advertised, but its $/TB is awful.
I archive on m-disc, but I doubt it will last long.
Blu-ray players are practically obsolete.
In 5 years they will have gone the way of the cassette tape(which I also used to use for data), the 8-trac and the wire recorder whatever they were called.
I wish they would stay in use, but I doubt they will.
For example I bought my m-disc burner in 2013.
It does everything but litescribe, even copies uhd since it was made pre drm. No innovation in 10 years tells me the tech is dead. The only Blu-rays I use anymore are the occasional 3d one for entertainment.
My m-discs will only be readable as long as I can get a working player. It isn't a 1000 year storage option and neither is rare pieces of glass.
I archive on m-disc, but I doubt it will last long.
Blu-ray players are practically obsolete.
In 5 years they will have gone the way of the cassette tape(which I also used to use for data), the 8-trac and the wire recorder whatever they were called.
I wish they would stay in use, but I doubt they will.
For example I bought my m-disc burner in 2013.
It does everything but litescribe, even copies uhd since it was made pre drm. No innovation in 10 years tells me the tech is dead. The only Blu-rays I use anymore are the occasional 3d one for entertainment.
My m-discs will only be readable as long as I can get a working player. It isn't a 1000 year storage option and neither is rare pieces of glass.
The people who actually care about 1000 or billion year longevity are probably adding pictograph instructions for post-apocalypse humans or aliens to look at, as long as they can bring their own microscope. It might be easier to reverse engineer a reader that can produce the correct sequence of binary bits, than it would be to correctly interpret the data formats used, especially if there is a species barrier.
We can still use this kind of longevity in the consumer market, if it effectively removes degradation of the storage medium as a concern. You would prefer if your storage didn't fail in under 50 years. Yet there are plenty of HDD, SSDs, and optical discs that have failed in under 5 years from mishandling or bad luck.
CDs have been around for 41 years, and there are still relatively cheap drives being mass produced that can read CDs. If we had another 12 cm consumer disc to succeed Blu-ray, the demise of CD/DVD/Blu-ray readability could be postponed since most drives maintain backwards compatibility (notably, the PlayStation 5 doesn't support CDs while the Xbox Series X does). But that ain't happening and the disc drives continue to be dropped from consumer electronics. We're left with other options with their own problems, like big HDDs that can fail suddenly and catastrophically, or SSDs using ever-worse NAND in pursuit of density (PLC will be on the menu soon).
Archival Disc would have been an advancement.
But the time it takes to read and write on optical discs is pretty inconvenient. It is hard to get past that.
I highly suspect the exaggerated lifespan is BS. Glass isn't really a solid - it flows exceptionally slowly. Yeah, it take a long time. After a hundred years the top of a pane of glass is visibly thinner than the bottom. This very slow flow is inconsequential for almost any usage, but when storing very tiny bits ANY movement is bad and as the decades pass there will be movement.
CDs have been around for 41 years, and there are still relatively cheap drives being mass produced that can read CDs. If we had another 12 cm consumer disc to succeed Blu-ray, the demise of CD/DVD/Blu-ray readability could be postponed since most drives maintain backwards compatibility (notably, the PlayStation 5 doesn't support CDs while the Xbox Series X does). But that ain't happening and the disc drives continue to be dropped from consumer electronics. We're left with other options with their own problems, like big HDDs that can fail suddenly and catastrophically, or SSDs using ever-worse NAND in pursuit of density (PLC will be on the menu soon).
"Archival Disc" was supposed to be the successor to "Blu-Ray" as a WORM storage medium.
If you take the current "Archival Disc" density of 83.3… GB/layer
A single "Quad Layer" disc could net you 333 GB using the existing Blu-Ray Quad-Layer stack near the bottom.
If you tried to go for the hybrid 3-layer Stack in the middle and 4-layer Stack on the outside that the HD-DVD consortium proposed to hybridize HD-DVD & Blu-Ray, that would allow for a cheap 7-Layer per side Optical Disc.
If you used a Mini-Disc like Cartridge system, I came up with a specification for a 130mm Optical Disc that would net you 40% more Optical Data Area over the 120 mm standard Optical Disc by Min/Maxing the inner & outter areas and using Sonys existing smaller Metal hub.
40% more Data area for 10mm more Optical Disc Diameter is a "BIG DEAL" if you're willing to break backwards compatibility and create a dedicated "Double-Sided" Archival Disc using a Mini-Disc style 4mm thick Protective Cartridge system to protect the "Double-Sided" 7-Layer Optical Disc.
At 7-Layers I estimated a data capacity of 1520.506 GiB on one side spread across 7-Layers.
3041.012 GiB across 2-sides.
But with the properly designed Optical Disc Drive, you can Read/Write to both sides simultaneously.
Especially if you're using Multi-X like technology.
Archival Disc would have been an advancement.
But the time it takes to read and write on optical discs is pretty inconvenient. It is hard to get past that.
The old Kenwood 72x CD-ROM technology where they split 1x beam into 7x beams and read back the data was legit. I owned it, it was great.
If Kenwood kept updating it with the times as Optical Disc Mediums evolved, it would've gotten MUCH faster and made reading a entire disc relatively painless.
They already had 7x Beams working in the commercial 72x variant.
They were doing R&D on splitting into 11 beams.
One day, I was hoping they would hit 15x different beams.
I've estimated how fast a modern 7x Beam Multi-X type drive would perform on Blu-Ray:
For Marketing / TradeMark purposes, I called it a HeptaDrive, but it's still the Multi-X drive technology that Kenwood pioneered all those decades ago.
I just wish Sony would take the ball and update it.
"Archival Disc" was supposed to be the successor to "Blu-Ray" as a WORM storage medium.
If you take the current "Archival Disc" density of 83.3… GB/layer
A single "Quad Layer" disc could net you 333 GB using the existing Blu-Ray Quad-Layer stack near the bottom.
I'm aware of Archival Disc. I don't think they're priced for consumers, and I'm not sure if the 1 TB version has appeared in any form. Despite 1 TB optical discs being demoed in the lab over a decade ago.
The last chance for consumers would be a new capacity/drive push for 8K content, which doesn't seem like it will happen for cost reasons, and because streaming services can use DRM more effectively.
I'm aware of Archival Disc. I don't think they're priced for consumers, and I'm not sure if the 1 TB version has appeared in any form. Despite 1 TB optical discs being demoed in the lab over a decade ago.
The last chance for consumers would be a new capacity/drive push for 8K content, which doesn't seem like it will happen for cost reasons, and because streaming services can use DRM more effectively.
If Sony was worried about DRM, they could create a dedicated 130 mm Optical Disc that isn't compatible with Blu-Ray, then they don't have to worrya bout one drive replacing the other.
Archival Disc can be used for it's original purpose of mass offline storage.
OMG they invented the crystals from stargate SG2 ! I always found funny that alien computing technology relied on crystals for data storage, but it all makes sense now.
The future is now, and we are the Aliens ! (Bill Gates anyways)
I highly suspect the exaggerated lifespan is BS. Glass isn't really a solid - it flows exceptionally slowly. Yeah, it take a long time. After a hundred years the top of a pane of glass is visibly thinner than the bottom. This very slow flow is inconsequential for almost any usage, but when storing very tiny bits ANY movement is bad and as the decades pass there will be movement.
What kind of article touts the write-speed improvements in the subtitle, without ever telling us how fast they are to write? For that matter, I'd like to know the linear read-speed, track-to-track seek, and full-random seek time, as well.
Also, what's the minimum block size you can read? And can they be written in multiple sessions, or do you have to write them all in one go?
Using Project Silica technology, it is possible to store approximately 1.75 million songs or around 3,500 movies on a palm-sized slice of glass.
OMG! Can we please stop being told how big storage is in terms of songs, movies, books, etc? On a site like this, I'm sure we all have a pretty good sense of what 7 TB means. This is practically insulting!
Finally, I'm skeptical the durability will stay at 10k years. The way tech trends seem to go, the density will keep getting pushed and pushed until the durability drops to like 100 or even 10 years.
There's alot of believability to it since the dye they use for Archival Disc & Blu-Ray is In-organic & Phase Change based.
MS Claiming that their Glass Substrate will stay un-changed for 10,000 years sounds great in theory.
But this is like Version 0.# of their Glass Substrate tech, as with most things in the tech world, it usually takes up to Version 3 transitioning onto 4 to be reliable enough and believable.
We've went from:
Ver 1 = CD
Ver 2 = DVD
Ver 3 = Blu-Ray
Ver 4 = Archival Disc
As far as reliability of the Optical Disc medium, it's proven itself pretty well for Blu-Ray so far and the move to Inorganic Dyes is a big boost to the credibility of long life for the medium in off-line storage in a reasonable temperature environment over the long term IMO.
While LTO tapes are cheap, they have the issue of "VERY COMPLICATED & EXPENSIVE" Tape Players instead of the cheaper & more reliable VCR style Dual Spool Tape Cassette structure.
2x, they still price the LTO Drives out of the reach of consumers, when old school Tape Recorders & VCRs had common mass produced units for the common folk.
So the fact that somebody doesn't want to take the LTO technology and make a consumer version REALLY sucks.
Also Tape Longevity isn't great IMO compared to Optical Drive.
I highly suspect the exaggerated lifespan is BS. Glass isn't really a solid - it flows exceptionally slowly. Yeah, it take a long time. After a hundred years the top of a pane of glass is visibly thinner than the bottom. This very slow flow is inconsequential for almost any usage, but when storing very tiny bits ANY movement is bad and as the decades pass there will be movement.
It is extremely hard to beat the economics of what NAND has done over the last 20 years, I don't expect spinning rust to last another 5 years. Storage that can retain data at least a year and can cycle 50 times is going to be good enough for nearly every consumer use case, and even if it isn't its still going to be in every device due to price. Good enough to last the warranty period is good enough for consumer application.
Now take this glass technology, press it on small round disks, modify the read-out technology so it fits in current disk drives and call it a Blue Ray successor.
For being in the very early stages, this is pretty impressive stuff. It will only get better over time. Everyone remembers what hard drives looked like in their early stages, right?
People these days are expecting perfection off the start line. That's not how technology works, gentlemen.
Drop a piece of glass? Why would you design a system where that was physcially possible? Relatively trivial to design a pull-only system where the arm pulls the glass from a storage tray, and gravity makes it physically impossible for the glass to go anywhere but the pull arm. Then the pull arm delivers the glass to the reader which again pulls the glass onto a read device. There's never a need for it to be possible for the glass to fall.
However, breakage is not impossible (earthquake, asteroid hit) which is why all such systems are also designed with redundancies of various strategies, including off-site backups for that asteroid hit.
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