Daily Tech News Show Microsoft’s 10,000-year Storage Tech - DTNS 5209
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Feb 19, 2026 Dr. Nikki (Nicole Ackermans), researcher focused on technology and data preservation. She unpacks Microsoft’s Project Silica and how femtosecond lasers write data into glass voxels. They cover 5D encoding, capacity and longevity claims, plus practical hurdles for adoption and archival use. Other segments touch on wearables, youth safety testimony, and privacy controversies.
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Glass-Based 5D Archival Storage
- Microsoft Project Silica stores data by writing nanoscale voxels into glass using femtosecond lasers for ultra-dense 5D optical storage.
- The team claims a 10,000-year lifetime at room temperature and demonstrated 4.8 TB on a 120 mm square, 2 mm thick glass cube.
How Data Is Encoded And Decoded
- Data is encoded in voxels across three spatial layers plus wavelength and polarization to add dimensions, decoded with a convolutional neural network.
- Researchers add redundancy and encryption layers so symbols map back to bits even with partial degradation.
Capacity And Write Performance
- A small glass cube (120 mm square, 2 mm thick) can hold about 4.8 TB, roughly 2 million books or 5,000 UHD movies.
- Writing uses 10–25 million laser pulses per second, offering archival-speed write performance comparable to tape, not daily storage.