Overview
- The system encodes data as three-dimensional voxels inside borosilicate glass using femtosecond laser pulses and retrieves it via microscopy with machine-learning decoding.
- Accelerated-aging tests indicate at least 10,000 years of stability at 290°C, suggesting vastly longer lifetimes at room temperature.
- New birefringent and phase voxel modalities plus multi-laser parallel writing raise density and throughput, though write speeds remain far below hard drives and SSDs.
- A 12 cm × 12 cm × 2 mm plate stored about 4.8 terabytes across 301 layers, demonstrating reliable writing, reading and decoding in an automated setup.
- Microsoft has not announced a production timeline, with cost, scaling and vulnerability to shattering or chemical corrosion flagged as remaining challenges for cold-archive use cases.