"If we carry on the way we're going, we're going to have to concrete the whole planet just to store the data that we're generating," explains a deputy lab director at Microsoft Research Cambridge in a new video.
Fortunately, "A small sheet of glass can now hold several terabytes of data, enough to store approximately 1.75 million songs or 13 years' worth of music," explains a Microsoft Research web page about "Project Silica". (Data is retrieved by a high-speed, computer-controlled microscope from a library of glass disks storing data in three-dimensional pixels called voxels):
Magnetic storage, although prevalent, is problematic. Its limited lifespan necessitates frequent re-copying, increasing energy consumption and operational costs over time. "Magnetic technology has a finite lifetime," says Ant Rowstron, Distinguished Engineer, Project Silica. "You must keep copying it over to new generations of media. A hard disk drive might last five years. A tape, well, if you're brave, it might last ten years. But once that lifetime is up, you've got to copy it over. And that, frankly, is both difficult and tremendously unsustainable if you think of all that energy and resource we're using."
Project Silica aims to break this cycle. Developed under the aegis of Microsoft Research, it can store massive amounts of data in glass plates roughly the size of a drink coaster and preserve the data for thousands of years.
You can read more in an article in slashdot.org at: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/10/14/236219/is-glass-the-future-of-storage