The world is producing an insane amount of data every year. And there will be more and more. Transport, diagnostics, communications. Everything will come from data. To give you some clues, the International Data Corp expects the world to produce 175 zettabytes of data by 2025. That's 142 zettabytes more, almost double the data produced in the world in 2018. For the less familiar: 1 zettabyte equals to 1 billion terabytes or 1 trillion gigabytes.
Needless to say, memorizing these data This is not an easy task and is far beyond the scope of available storage devices such as hard drives and magnetic disks. The storage of the future will have to take into account the enormous volumes, and also the adequate resilience needs, to avoid the loss of so much data.
The memory of the future
Motivated by this undoubted global need, scientists are now exploring alternative materials for making storage devices. And one of the most promising materials they're looking at is glass, or to be more precise a 2mm thick sheet of glass that's about the size of a post-it note.
This concept had mostly remained confined to pure theory until Microsoft, as part of its Silica project, wrote and recovered the film Superman (1978) on a single small piece of glass. A symbolic film, obviously, because it told of how memories could be preserved in crystals. This method can be used to store up to 360 terabytes of data on a DVD-sized disk, and is the embryo of the memory of the future.
Not just Microsoft
Microsoft is not alone in this research. Also Seagate is working on using glass for optical data storage. “The challenge is to develop systems that can read and write with reasonable throughput”Said John Morris, Seagate Chief Technology Officer.
At the moment, the challenge is not only to make the writing process more feasible, but also to simplify the writing process.
