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Hitachi's Quartz

Hitachi's Quartz

Author: Dominic Yoko
Date: 2012-09-26
Japanese multi-national Hitachi has discovered a way to store digital information on slices of quartz glass. This data can seemingly exist forever, enduring extreme temperatures and hostile conditions without degrading.

According to the report, the new tech stores data in binary form by creating dots inside thin sheets of quartz glass that can be read using a standard optical microscope. The current prototype is roughly 4 centimetres square and 5 millimetres thick and consists of four layers of dots which can hold up to 40 MB per square inch; approximately the density of a music CD.

Quartz glass is highly stable and resilient material, used to make beakers and other instruments for laboratory use. Due to the medium, the chip is waterproof, resistant to many chemicals and unaffected by radio waves. Even more, it can be exposed directly to high temperature flames and heated to 1,000 degrees centigrade for at least two hours without being damaged.

The inherit benefits of this highly durable mode of storing data are quite clear. We have grown much since we created digital data storage, however in terms of saving the data for later generations we have not evolved much since our cave painting ancestors. While current data solutions like cloud computing and RAID systems do act as safeguards for our data, there is still no definite system that can be called a truly safe storage.

There's no indication as to when this storage solution will become commercially available, but researchers indicated that government agencies, museums and religious organizations would likely be first in line.