A Millennium Old Glass Hard Drive, Let's Take a Look at The Latest Technology

The most stable storage device in the world currently developed by Microsoft, the "Memory Crystal" glass hard drive, is made by placing tiny dots called "voxels" in pure quartz glass to change the path of light passing through it. Microsoft is an optical storage medium made of quartz glass. Compared with ordinary mechanical hard drives, it is not only small in size and large in space, but also has unparalleled stability and service life. Researchers use laser beams to change the glass and make it store "memory" as much as possible. It adopts the data input method of laser short pulses, uses infrared laser at different angles and depths to create a layer of three-dimensional nano gratings, and encodes and stores data.

Its length and width are 75mm, and its thickness is only 2mm. In the initial development of glass hard drives, it could store 50GB of data, which is equivalent to a Blu ray disc. It can withstand 982 degrees Celsius and can be used for thousands of years without degrading the stored information. Later, Microsoft's glass hard drives can store up to 75.8GB of data internally, and no matter whether it encounters water, high temperature, physical or chemical damage, or electromagnetic interference, it will not damage the internal data. Its service life is even more than 1000 years. The R&D team stated that it is more suitable for storing important data that is large and needs to be permanently saved, without the need for regular data migration like other devices, which incurs additional costs, and there will be no loss of important data due to device damage.

The invention of this glass hard drive is undoubtedly a huge shock to the storage industry!

We have developed this new type of hard drive that allows data to be stored on a glass carrier for a long time, "said Matthias Boresner, the head of the research and a researcher at the Optoelectronics Research Center at the University of Southampton in the UK." This is a stable and secure portable storage device. It is very useful for institutions with a large amount of documentation, which must back up data every 5-10 years because current hard drive storage devices only have a short lifespan. Museums hope to preserve information or place a large number of real and useful documents in the National Archives, and our latest developed 'memory crystal' storage device can achieve this