Microsoft's high-tech glass storage Warner 1978 version of "Superman" can be stored for centuries

According to foreign media Variety, Microsoft and Warner Bros. have partnered to store a copy of the 1978 version of the "Superman" movie on a glass disc similar to the size of a coaster. The collaboration will be officially unveiled at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference. This will be the first test case for Microsoft's new storage technology, and this technology will be used to protect Hollywood movies and other film and television works for hundreds of years to come. For this glass storage medium, Ant Rowstron, chief researcher at Microsoft Research, said its service life can be up to thousands of years.

It is reported that the glass cube used to store the 1978 version of the "Superman" movie is 75×75×2mm in size and can hold 75.6GB of data. In addition, Microsoft is continuing to develop this technology to create glass hard drives with increasingly larger capacities. The main advantages of this new type of storage medium are its longevity and stability. After testing by the Microsoft project team, these storage media can still be read after being baked in an oven, soaked in boiling water, heated in a microwave oven, and scratched with steel wool.

Project Silica is a project proposed in 2016 by Microsoft and the Photonics Research Center of the University of Southampton to study the use of glass as a storage medium. The goal is to find a new storage medium that is optimized for what industry insiders like to call "cold data", which may be the type of data that does not need to be accessed for months, years or even decades. This data does not need to be placed on the server to be available 24/7, but can be kept in a vault without destroying anything that may damage it.

Warner Bros. has a lot of this "cold data." Founded in 1920, Warner Bros. has always wanted to preserve original film reels, audio from later radio shows, and other film and television works.

Project Silica uses a laser similar to the one used in Lasik eye surgery to burn shapes called voxels into the glass. These voxels hold multiple bits of information, unlike the pits and lands on a disc, which only hold zeros or ones. Plus, the glass hard drive can hold many layers. CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs can contain up to two layers, but Microsoft squeezed 74 layers into the hard drive that holds Superman. Newer discs have even more layers, according to Variety. The data can be accessed by shining light on the glass and analyzing the reflection using a microscope-like reader.

This collaboration between Microsoft and Warner Bros. is merely an experimental test. The technology still needs to mature, and engineers need to create a unified read/write device similar to today's disc burners. Also, studios aren't going to throw away millions of movie cans. The original analog version is arguably a more ideal source material for creating new prints or remastered videos.