Glass storage technology is nothing new. It is seen as a very suitable material for long-term durable storage, and recently, a startup called SPhotonix has shown off its glass storage offering with high capacity and long lifespan.
Sphotonix's glass storage technology is called 5D Memory Crystal and is being developed in the company's lab, and is ready to be used in data centers as "cold storage" storage, meaning it can be used as rarely accessed data storage for long periods of time soon.
According to SPhotonix, the storage medium used is a tempered silica glass plate, where data is written using femtosecond (10⁻¹⁵ seconds) laser light that will write data at the nanoscale. The data will be stored in a five-dimensional structure (x,y,z and the orientation and intensity of the structure), and this data will be read using polarized light.
SPhotonix further states that a five-inch 5D Memory Crystal glass storage can store 360TB of data for 13.8 billion years if it is stored properly. In terms of data writing and reading, initial experiments show a data writing rate of 4MB/s and a data reading rate of 30MB/s. It is expected that with technological advancements, it is not impossible for this figure to increase to 500MB/s within the next three to four years.
Another advantage of data storage medium using glass is that with appropriate storage techniques, this storage does not require any electricity supply during storage, and this saves electricity costs for any company that will use it.
As expected, this glass storage still needs to be developed before its use can be commercialized. Companies such as Microsoft and Cerabytes have also previously started to show offerings