"In a paper published in the journal Nature this week, Microsoft researchers now say these long-term storage qualities can be achieved using the same kind of borosilicate glass found in oven doors and Pyrex glassware. In their testing, they were able to etch 258 layers of data totaling roughly 2.02 TB onto a 2 mm thick borosilicate glass plate while achieving write speeds of between 18.4 and 65.9 Mbps depending on the number of laser beams used."
"The way Microsoft is etching the voxel data into the glass hasn't changed - it's still using femtosecond lasers - but its method for doing so has. Early attempts at glass-based storage, including Microsoft's, used "birefringent" voxels, which means they refract light differently depending on their polarization. According to Microsoft, this required multiple laser pulses to encode the data, which they were eventually able to reduce to two."
Borosilicate glass plates can be voxel-encoded with femtosecond lasers to store multiple terabytes of data while resisting water, heat, and dust. Common borosilicate such as oven glass or Pyrex is less expensive and easier to manufacture than fused silica yet still delivers long-term stability. Tests etched 258 layers totaling about 2.02 TB on a 2 mm plate with write speeds between 18.4 and 65.9 Mbps depending on laser beam count. The top write speed exceeded fused silica trials but achieved lower density than fused silica. Readback hardware was reduced from several cameras to one. Encoding moved away from birefringent voxels, lowering pulse requirements to two.
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