Microsoft Project Silica: Glass Storage Explained (opens in new tab)

Quick Answer: Traditional hard drives and SSDs have a maximum lifespan of roughly 5 to 15 years due to mechanical wear and flash memory degradation. To solve this long-term cold storage problem, Microsoft's Project Silica uses lasers to permanently encode data inside glass slabs, creating extreme-durability drives designed to last over 10,000 years. There is an uncomfortable truth about the hardware we rely on: all of it is actively dying. We spend our days optimizing database queries and bui...