Project Silica
microsoft.com
Project Silica
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Project Silica
#2Is this different than the quartz long-term data storage developed by Hitachi?
Re: Project Silica
#3Is this different than the quartz long-term data storage developed by Hitachi?
There's not much known on the Hitachi project and there's not been any news since it was first mentioned in 2012.
However, project silica is also using Quartz glass.
Re: Project Silica
#4I'm a bit turned off by the "humanity's needs" for storage in this article, where humanity would probably be more respected in an environment where longer term storage would be scarcer and curated. Hovering up every byte ever produced and storing it forever undoubtedly serves someone's [n|gr]eed, but it ain't "humanity's".
Re: Project Silica
#5I'm a bit turned off by the "humanity's needs" for storage in this article, where humanity would probably be more respected in an environment where longer term storage would be scarcer and curated. Hovering up every byte ever produced and storing it forever undoubtedly serves someone's [n|gr]eed, but it ain't "humanity's".
What on earth do you mean? Yes, MS is of course a for-profit company, but the long-term storage situation in academia alone is dire. I know from experience that most research data at my university exist as a single copy on a single external hard drive in a drawer (with a partial disorganised copy currently in processing on a laptop drive somewhere). This may be anything from the only records of a now dead language, or medical research data. Add to this that many seem to "forget" their data when it has been published on. Archiving is a contract with future generations and we are horribly prepared. The storage medium of the rosetta stone, handily beats the flimsy, digital solutions the vast majority use. Or did I completely misunderstand your point?
Re: Project Silica
#6I was asked the question about long term storage of news back in 2005. The answer hasn't really changed, fundamentally there is nothing you can buy that will give you rapid access other than a working computer and todays storage technology and it will need replacing and redundency. You need to budget to constantly move to new machines and storage technology and often you only have a 5 years to move off some technologies after they go obsolete.
The file formats are a bit stickier. The further you stray from basic text the less time the format tends to last and then you have the potential additional cost of developing a format conversion tool as well.
I see the appeal of this if its got sufficient access speed there are a bunch of organisations that will see value in keeping data archived permanently safe. But the problem of binary formats over the long term will persist and I am not sure there is much we can do about that. "Project Silica" will also become an obsolete storage medium as well, I don't think this changes the fundamentals.
I would be happier if they were talking about a zip drive like thing so we could all have this rather than a cloud service.
Re: Project Silica
#7[deleted]
Re: Project Silica
#8Love that this scifi trope is coming to life, I really do. Also pretty funny is the inevitability of dumb memes and porn being etched into glass for essentially eternity. We're gonna produce a lot of 'cave paintings'.
I wonder if/when this will scale down to become commercially available to consumers.
Re: Project Silica
#9I would imagine the laser recorder of Project silica would be prohibitively expensive for consumer. But I wouldn't mind to pay $100 if they could just write everything I had in the cloud and mail me the "disk" backup.
That is assuming the reader of this disc to be extremely affordable.
I only need a few of these to have my life's digital asset somewhat safely stored and protected.
Re: Project Silica
#10I would imagine the laser recorder of Project silica would be prohibitively expensive for consumer. But I wouldn't mind to pay $100 if they could just write everything I had in the cloud and mail me the "disk" backup. That is assuming the reader of this disc to be extremely affordable. I only need a few of these to have my life's digital asset somewhat safely stored and protected.
> I would imagine the laser recorder of Project silica would be prohibitively expensive for consumer.
the laser alone is going to be on the order of $100k.