Home Technology Microsoft wants Project Silica to be the future of storage

Microsoft wants Project Silica to be the future of storage

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Project-Vilica

Nothing lasts forever in this day and age, especially data. All your photos, your highlight clips on YouTube or even your favourite Blu-Ray movies are going to feel the rotting touch of time eventually as the information contained within those storage mediums begins to fade away. So what’s the best solution? A surprisingly transparent one: Glass.

First developed as a tool that could be used to see through walls, that humble amorphous solid has a wide array of applications that have helped create technological breakthroughs. Microsoft is looking to use glass for the next big step forward in information preservation for their Azure platform, with the most recent proof of concept being the transfer of the entire 1978 Superman movie to something that’s the mere size of a beer coaster.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed the breakthrough at the Ignite conference today, claiming that the company had stored an entire film on regular quartz glass through their Project Silica initiative that was capable of withstanding a battery of tests that included baking, scratching and boiling. While Microsoft may not be the first company to tackle the problem of protecting information through glass, having their considerable resources and a partnership with Warner Bros. to help preserve their film library is a serious step forward for the idea.

The catch here, is that the technology used to transfer all those ones and zeros to glass is chuffing expensive stuff, with a good dollop of complex thrown into the mix as well. Infrared lasers encode the data into the early 2000s most forgotten gaming graphical feature, voxels, and then that data is stored within glass where machine learning algorithms can read and transmit the data back to your peepers.

“If Project Silica’s storage solution proves to be as cost-effective and as scalable as it could be — and we all recognize it’s still early days — this is something we’d love to see adopted by other studios and our peers and other industries,” said Vicky Colf, Warner Bros. chief technology officer via The Verge.

Project Silica

If it works for us, we firmly believe that this will be a benefit to anyone who wants to preserve and archive content.

If Microsoft succeeds with Project Silica and can drive costs down, the future of data storage might just be a whole lot more transparent. Provided that nobody opens a hammer and trampoline factory next to Silicon Valley that is.

Last Updated: November 5, 2019

22 Comments

  1. Very interesting

    Reply

  2. Hammersteyn

    November 5, 2019 at 15:44

    Very interesting

    Reply

  3. Original Heretic

    November 5, 2019 at 15:44

    Silicone now being used for data storage?
    Wow, so all those upper decked pornstars are gonna become living, walking storage vessels for future generations.

    Reply

  4. Raptor Rants

    November 5, 2019 at 15:45

    I’m sure this has been done before……

    Reply

  5. Admiral Chief

    November 5, 2019 at 15:31

    It can withstand baking, scratching and boiling. But can it withstand the salty salt of the internet?

    Reply

  6. Hammersteyn

    November 5, 2019 at 15:44

    Very interesting

    Reply

    • Admiral Chief

      November 5, 2019 at 15:44

      Huehuehue, you remembered

      Reply

    • Admiral Chief

      November 5, 2019 at 15:44

      Huehuehue, you remembered

      Reply

      • Hammersteyn

        November 5, 2019 at 18:14

        No, Darryn had to hit me with a sledgehammer in one of the headers. There’s three I think.

        Reply

  7. Original Heretic

    November 5, 2019 at 15:44

    Silicone now being used for data storage?
    Wow, so all those upper decked pornstars are gonna become living, walking storage vessels for future generations.

    Reply

    • Pennywise The Dancing Clown

      November 5, 2019 at 16:34

      “Excuse me honey, but you got the Kama Sutra in them libraries?”

      Reply

  8. Raptor Rants

    November 5, 2019 at 15:45

    I’m sure this has been done before……

    Reply

    • Raptor Rants

      November 5, 2019 at 15:57

      no seriously. I am so sure I’ve read of this or something very similar where huge amounts of data could be stored in a medium that would last effectively forever

      Reply

      • Admiral Chief

        November 5, 2019 at 18:14

        Older news, a few years ago, crystals, hence the Superman connection (data crystals)

        Reply

        • Raptor Rants

          November 5, 2019 at 21:34

          yeah and they stored like entire libraries of books or something on it.

          Reply

      • HairyEwok

        November 7, 2019 at 05:43

        You’re not wrong. They basically made a crystal cube that could store vast amounts of data but once the data was on there it could not be re-written or modified.

        Reply

      • HairyEwok

        November 7, 2019 at 05:43

        You’re not wrong. They basically made a crystal cube that could store vast amounts of data but once the data was on there it could not be re-written or modified.

        Reply

      • HairyEwok

        November 7, 2019 at 05:43

        You’re not wrong. They basically made a crystal cube that could store vast amounts of data but once the data was on there it could not be re-written or modified.

        Reply

        • Raptor Rants

          November 7, 2019 at 05:45

          aaaaaah. I’m glad I wasn’t going mad lol

          Reply

        • Raptor Rants

          November 7, 2019 at 05:45

          aaaaaah. I’m glad I wasn’t going mad lol

          Reply

  9. Alien Emperor Trevor

    November 5, 2019 at 16:10

    Meanwhile on the other side of the galaxy…

    http://giphygifs.s3.amazonaws.com/media/7xCds0RBfyWQ0/giphy.gif

    Reply

  10. Kromas

    November 6, 2019 at 11:10

    Wait … Supermans Fortress is run by data crystals ….. I see what they did there!

    Reply

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