- Writing a full 4.8TB crystal disk takes more than 18 days. too slow for daily operations
- Cheaper borosilicate glass reduces costs but does not solve practical limitations
- Microsoft statement signals closure rather than commitment to future development
Microsoft has offered a new update on Project Silica, its long-running effort to store digital information inside glass plates for centuries.
The company says new research published in Nature shows that borosilicate glass, similar to the material used in oven doors and Pyrex glassware, can retain data much longer than conventional archiving systems such as HDDs, SSDs or magnetic tape.
Laboratory tests suggest a viable lifespan of more than 10,000 years, far beyond the limits of current physical storage media.
Breaking new ground with borosilicate glass
The concept is based on femtosecond lasers that encode data as three-dimensional microscopic structures known as voxels within the glass.
Previous experiments relied on expensive fused silica, which limited practicality, storing 4.84 TB per 2 mm thick plate.
The latest work replaces this material with cheaper borosilicate glass while maintaining its long-term durability.
Microsoft reported that it encoded 258 layers of data totaling about 2.02 TB on a 2 mm thick plate.
The company achieved write speeds ranging from 18.4 to 65.9 Mbps, depending on the number of parallel laser beams used.
That maximum speed is higher than the 25.6 Mbps previously achieved with fused silica, although the density of borosilicate is less than half that of fused silica.
Durability remains critical to glass’s appeal, as conventional storage media inevitably degrade.
Microsoft conducted accelerated aging tests to simulate long-term decomposition, and the borosilicate plates remained structurally intact without significant loss of encoded data over millennia.
While this technology is fascinating, when you look at the practical side, it barely holds up: writing an entire 4.8 TB drive at 25.6 Mbits/s, about 3 MB/s, would take about 18.5 days.
Even the fastest speeds of 65.9 Mbps are slow for anything beyond long-term files; It might be useful if you want to store data for millennia and never access it again, but that’s a small niche and one that most companies aren’t willing to invest in at scale.
Even with cheaper borosilicate glass, simplified hardware, and phase-based voxels that reduce complexity, the economics don’t make sense.
You’re still talking about precision lasers, multiple layers of coding, and careful calibration.
It’s not just a matter of production cost: the workflow is slow and any mistake can ruin a plate that took days to write.
Microsoft is not showing much enthusiasm: the future of Project Silica remains unclear and its fate may already be sealed, as the company’s recent statement on Project Silica reads more like a polite summary than a plan for the future.
“The research phase is now complete and we continue to consider learnings from Project Silica as we explore the continued need for sustainable, long-term preservation of digital information. We have added this paper to our published work so that others can build on it,” the company said in a blog post.
That statement suggests the company is closing the chapter and allowing others to continue the work.
There is no sign of scaling, no roadmap for commercialization, and no indication that the company sees a viable market for this technology.
Sharing research is valuable to the scientific community, but does not indicate internal commitment.
Taken together, the language feels like a quiet step backwards, making it reasonable to suspect that Project Silica will never be able to move beyond the laboratory.
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