2.5 Admins 2.5 Admins 289: Hunter2
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Mar 5, 2026 A deep dive into futuristic glass cold storage and how single-pulse writing could change archival durability. Discussion of NVIDIA entering the PC SoC market and what ARM Windows might mean for OEMs. A clear warning against using LLMs to generate passwords due to predictability. Practical advice on whistleblowing when sensitive customer data is mishandled.
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Microsoft Moving Glass Cold Storage Toward Product
- Microsoft claims glass cold storage can be commercially viable after research ended and moves to productization.
- They switched from fused silica to borosilicate and cut writes from four laser pulses to one, enabling cheaper media and more reliable atomic writes.
Glass Plates Promise Ultra Long Lasting Cold Storage
- Glass plates (120 mm square, 2 mm thick) can store ~4.8 TB using 301 layers and promise multi-millennial retention by resisting moisture and common physical degradation.
- Artificial aging suggests ~10,000 years readability and simpler long-term compatibility than LTO tape ecosystems.
Throughput Versus Compatibility Defines Archival Tradeoffs
- Glass storage write speed is currently low per beam (~3 MB/s) but is parallelizable by using multiple beams, while LTO offers much higher single-stream throughput.
- Real archival failures often stem from ecosystem dependencies (drives, firmware, software), not media decay.
