The world's first petabyte disk can be made of glass

IDC predicts the world will produce 175 zettabytes (GB) of data by 2025, driven by demand for high-definition video and the growing Internet of Things networks.

This is almost six times more than in 2018, and this is just the beginning, because according to estimates, before the end of the decade, the numbers will make you dizzy.

It is true that only a fraction of them will require storage, but even in this situation, current solutions may not be enough: "We believe that the human appetite for storage will force scientists to look at completely different types of materials," explains Waguih Ishak of Corning Research and Development Corp.

And no wonder, since currently the largest hard drives can boast a capacity of around 20 TB.

This means that engineers have to get down to work and propose solutions that match their needs - one of them seems to be drives that use quartz glass slides, such as those presented last November by Microsoft as part of its Project Silica.

We are talking about structures measuring 75 x 75 x 2 mm, which are able to store up to 75.6 GB of data.

Moreover, while glass is involved, the tests showed remarkable resistance to poor treatment.

The team tried to drown the medium, put it in the microwave, demagnetized it, boiled it in water, scrubbed with steel wool and baked it at 260 ℃ - the data remained intact and could be read normally.

Modern data warehouses based on them would therefore be able to survive many natural disasters and not only such as fires, floods, earthquakes, overcharges, power outages or magnetic field interference, and they take up much less space.

Sounds future-proof?

Of course, that's why other vendors liked the idea, and in June this year Seagate CEO John Morris confirmed that his R&D department is also working on a solution that uses glass for data storage.

But glass media still has a lot of problems, and one of the most important seems to be the fact that nowadays they only allow data to be written once and then read, so they are not yet as functional as the current rewrite and read solutions.

Scientists are hopeful, however: - I am convinced that this is a matter of a decade and we will see a completely new type of media that will outshine everything we know today.

And I am sincerely convinced that pure materials, such as quartz glass, will play a huge role in this, adds Waguih Ishak, quoted earlier.

Nevertheless, there are challenges and it is impossible to miss them, e.g. the recording process is still unreliable and difficult to repeat, and it is difficult to minimize the time needed for it - reading is not easy either, because then wave polarization and camera recording come into play.

and machine learning algorithms that analyze images and translate them into data.

In short, the potential is huge, but there is even more work and obstacles, and we are certainly not talking about a solution that we will see in the near future.