Imagine, just for a second, that there is a severe natural disaster — or — even scarier — a nuclear attack. You and your loved ones are safe, but you’ve lost everything. Anything you had saved is gone forever.
Not anymore. In a Kryptonian-esque information storage system, data and information such as family photos, business documents, and endless other items can now be stored indefinitely, in the midst of almost any environmental condition, on crystals.
Researchers at Hitachi Data Systems in Tokyo, Japan, have found a way to store data on quartz. Because the crystal is highly resistant to heat and water, and not subject to degradation, stored data could be kept for hundreds of millions of years.
According to Hitachi, “The quartz prototype is a two-centimeter square by two-millimeter thick piece where data is recorded in four layers of dots, which can hold 40 MB per square inch…researchers believe that adding more layers to increase density is possible.”
Hitachi compares the quartz data storage to the Rosetta stone:
“The Rosetta Stone had the same information recorded in two different languages and three different scripts including hieroglyphics that served as a translation table. Luckily, one of the languages was still understood by scholars who could read and interpret the information. Today there is a universal language, which is binary. So any computer that can be programmed to read binary should be able to interpret the data any time into the future. Retrieving data from the quartz would require an optical microscope, which would be analogous to having a scholar capable of reading the inscriptions in the stone. The durability of the quartz should make it possible to preserve information even through cataclysmic events like tsunamis, fires and floods, as long as the Quartz sliver is not broken.
Even then, it might be possible to piece it back together like a broken stone tablet.”
Hitachi says there are no immediate plans for bringing this data storage product to market.