Microsoft's Project Silica

2021 Media Shipments Exabytes Revenue $/GB Flash598$68.6B$0.115 Hard Disk1418$28.0B$0.020 LTO Tape59.2$0.51B$0.003 I summed up my big picture view of archival media eight years ago in Archival Media: Not a Good Business. Whatever your choice of technology, the economics are brutal. This is a version of the table in that post, updated to 2021 and again based upon IBM data. Note that archival media shiped 4% as many bytes as hard disk and generated 1.8% or the revenue. It remains a tiny market. I have written several times about Microsoft Research's Project Silica, most recently in last year's Archival Storage: I'm skeptical of "commoditizing the technology". Archival systems are a niche in the IT market, and one on which companies are loath to spend money. Realistically, there aren't going to be a vast number of Silica write heads. The only customers for systems like Silica are the large cloud providers, who will be reluctant to commit their archives to technology owned by a…