Microsoft has been working on a special project for data storage for some time: it's called Silica. What is it about? Imagine being able to store information using high-precision lasers that etch data into glass in an indestructible manner, with an estimated lifespan of 10.000 years.
The problem of long-term storage
Every day, we produce an impressive amount of data. Photos, documents, videos, everything is stored in some form of digital memory. But there's a problem: the limited lifespan of storage devices. Hard drives can last five years, maybe less, in a data center. Even magnetic tapes, considered more durable, have a limited useful life. Not to mention the energy cost. Maintaining data requires energy, and a lot of it.
Project Silica di Microsoft he wants to solve problems with a special glass, altered at a molecular level by laser pulses to encapsulate information within it. A process that makes the data practically indestructible, even if the plate were to be scratched.
How Project Silica works
The process of writing and reading data, they write at Microsoft, it's a little more complicated than traditional methods. Start with the Write Lab, where a laser etches data in the form of voxels (3D pixels) into the glass. To access the data, a small robot activates to select the correct plate. Next, a computer-controlled microscope reads the voxels. Finally, an artificial intelligence converts this visual data into usable digital files.
Ant Rowstron, a Microsoft engineer, underlines that this is not a mere academic exercise, but a method that can have a very wide field of application: with the resources at its disposal, Microsoft has the potential to bring this technology to the commercialization phase.
Obviously we still need some time
There are many development phases of Project Silica. There is work to be done, from identifying the material to the "writing" and conservation system, through to better capacity (currently 7 tera per single glass plate, the equivalent of 1.75 million songs, 13 years of listening). If you then add the creation of devices for the industrial production of these instruments, we are still a few years away from large-scale diffusion.
When we get there, our memories and our knowledge can be kept perfectly intact for generations, without the fear of losing them. And certainly, they say at Microsoft, we will immediately have improvements for cloud data too.
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