Storage device boiled in salt water, then grilled in an oven as proof of durability — Cerabyte's glass storage media claimed to be ultra-rugged
Cerabyte has previously stated its archival glass storage has a 5,000 year lifespan.

Storage startup Cerabyte has shared a video in which it torture tests its memory media. The firm took a sliver of its archival glass storage and boiled it in a kettle filled with salt water (100C, 212F), then, for good measure, it grilled it in a pizza oven (250C, 480F). The durability demo confirms that the media was unscathed after this process, and the data on the Cerabyte media remained “100% intact.”
A demo similar to the embedded video below occurred during the recent Open Compute Project (OCP) summit in Dublin, Ireland. While Cerabyte didn’t seem to pack their toaster for the Irish event, the salt water boiling test was extended over several days. It was noted that the kettle had begun to corrode after 24 hours of hot, salty agitation.
Cerabyte has developed this entertaining shtick to maintain interest in its archival glass storage, which we highlighted on Tom’s Hardware last July. Founded in Germany in 2022, Cerabyte aims to revolutionize data storage by commercializing a data storage medium “as durable as hieroglyphs.” That might be an understatement, if Cerabyte’s touted 5,000-year integrity claim turns out to be accurate (stay tuned for an update).
The ceramic-on-glass material Cerabyte uses in these durability tests stores data imprinted via femtosecond laser nanoscale holes in a ceramic medium 50 to 100 atoms thick. The ultra-thin 9cm square glass chips are written to at a rate of two million bits per laser pulse and can store up to 1GB of data on either surface.


There’s no spooky science behind the durability. Glass is naturally resistant to aging in good 'cold storage' conditions. And, as the Cerabyte trade show demos show, it can shrug off being boiled in salt water for extended periods, or even being severely toasted.
We wouldn’t expect glass-based storage to get corrupted at temperatures much lower than its melting point (around 1,400 degrees Celsius or 2,552 degrees Fahrenheit). Still, we aren’t sure about the unspecified ceramic layer or the interface/bonding between these materials. We also aren’t sure how durable Cerabyte’s ultra-thin media would be if subjected to any impact or shocks. Still, it is naturally resistant to corruption from other common accidents and acts of God that involve fire, water, radiation, or EMP.
Going forward, Cerabyte hopes to reduce media costs to less than $1 per TB by 2030. It isn’t all about glass slide-based storage, either. CeraTape is on its roadmap, and each tape targets storage of an exabyte of data.
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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
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passivecool If it is like a CD / DVD (youngsters, ask your parents about this laser-engraved metal layer packed in plastic)Reply
then it is great as long as there are devices around to read them.
I found my (pretty brilliant, I'm sure) college papers on floppies the size of a small pizza.
I threw them away. No way to capture the data.
Okay, if an alien species comes 1000 years after we have eradicated ourselves and are /really/ curious, they will figure it out. ... but that is not really the case scenario I have in mind when buying storage.
But if it is ripe and cheap then there will surely be lots of usages that i would surely support.
They can put the construction manual+IP on a metal disk in a satellite in orbit as a backup. -
usertests
The problem is that there is no clear plan to bring any new storage mediums to consumers. They are all focused on enterprise. Hollywood wants to keep consumers hooked on streaming with no more physical media.passivecool said:If it is like a CD / DVD (youngsters, ask your parents about this laser-engraved metal layer packed in plastic)
then it is great as long as there are devices around to read them.
I found my (pretty brilliant, I'm sure) college papers on floppies the size of a small pizza.
I threw them away. No way to capture the data.
That's bad since putting it into the hands of hundreds of millions of people would result in a lot of independent archiving of information, with many readers spread across the world, easily obtainable even after a global calamity. Instead, we're seeing optical drives disappearing completely, with DVD drives going away and Blu-ray never having caught on in PCs.
$1/TB sounds great, but it's less great if the read/write machine costs $10,000. Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but for now, there's no relevance to most people. -
USAFRet
The other half of that, is that (most) consumers don't seem to want local storage.usertests said:The problem is that there is no clear plan to bring any new storage mediums to consumers.
Small thin laptops, phone, tablet....all content consumption devices, with the content stored elsewhere that the user doesn't have to manage. -
heffeque
I don't know what you mean. My experience is that a lot of people have an external USB drive for backups... and some even have a NAS (be it a basic NAS, or more advanced NAS, depending on how tech-savvy the person is).USAFRet said:The other half of that, is that (most) consumers don't seem to want local storage. -
USAFRet
And my experience, apart from me, is that they do not have that.heffeque said:I don't know what you mean. My experience is that a lot of people have an external USB drive for backups... and some even have a NAS (be it a basic NAS, or more advanced NAS, depending on how tech-savvy the person is).
Not even for backups.
Family members, coworkers, etc, etc....
My NAS is a bit over 100TB available space.
My backup routine is quite comprehensive.
Even among people here at Tom's.....no backup, no external storage.
Daily, we see "Oh My!! Please help me recover my data!!" -
derekullo If they can scale up from 1 gigabyte on a side to 1 terabyte on a side and get the speed up to 2 gigabytes a second (i'm assuming for both read and write) then they could really upend the storage market at least for businesses with large data requirements and data centers.Reply
They don't mention if data is able to be rewritten which I am curious about ... how do you unhole a hole? lol
At sufficient speed it may actually be cheaper to simply replace with another $1 piece of ceramic and rewrite all data ... but that is just speculation.
https://www.cerabyte.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Cerabyte-White-Paper-2-25.pdf
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence