- Writing a full 4.8TB glass disc takes more than 18 days — far too slow for daily operations
- Cheaper borosilicate glass reduces costs but cannot fix practical limitations
- Microsoft’s statement signals closure rather than a commitment to future development
Microsoft has offered a fresh 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 preserve data far longer than conventional archive systems such as HDD, SSD, 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 relies on femtosecond lasers which encode data as microscopic three-dimensional structures known as voxels inside the glass.
Earlier experiments depended on expensive fused silica, which limited practicality, storing 4.84TB per 2mm thick plate.
The latest work replaces this material with cheaper borosilicate glass while maintaining long-term durability.
Microsoft reported encoding 258 layers of data totaling roughly 2.02TB onto a 2mm thick plate.
The company achieved write speeds ranging from 18.4 to 65.9Mbps, depending on the number of parallel laser beams used.
That top speed is higher than the 25.6Mbps previously achieved with fused silica, although the borosilicate density is less than half that of fused silica.
Durability remains central to the appeal of glass, as conventional storage media inevitably degrade.
Microsoft conducted accelerated aging tests to simulate long-term decay, and the borosilicate plates remained structurally intact with no major loss of encoded data over millennia.
While this technology is fascinating, when you look at the practical side, it barely holds up – as writing a full 4.8TB disc at 25.6Mbits/s, about 3MB/s, would take roughly 18.5 days.
Even the faster speeds of 65.9Mbps are slow for anything beyond long-term archives – it could useful if you want to lock data away for millennia and never access it again, but that is a small niche, and one most companies are not willing to invest in at scale.
Even with the cheaper borosilicate glass, simplified hardware, and phase-based voxels that reduce complexity, the economics do not make sense.
You are still talking about precision lasers, multiple layers of encoding, and careful calibration.
It is not just a matter of production cost — the workflow is slow, and any error 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 wrap-up than a plan for the future.
“The research phase is now complete, and we are continuing to consider learnings from Project Silica as we explore the ongoing need for sustainable, long-term preservation of digital information. We have added this paper to our published works so that others can build on them,” the company said in a blog post.
That statement suggests the company is closing the chapter while allowing others to continue the work.
There is no hint of scaling, no roadmap for commercialization, and no indication that the company sees a viable market for this technology.
Sharing the research is valuable for the scientific community, but it does not signal internal commitment.
Taken together, the language feels like a quiet step back, which makes it reasonable to suspect that Project Silica may never move beyond the lab.
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