We used Floppy Disks, CDs, DVDs, USB pen drivers, SD cards, Hard disks, SSD drivers and many other types of storage media in the past. Most of these technologies are built targeting two main points… Speed and Capacity. We tried our best to make these storage media read and write data as fast as possible. We need super fast but cheap storage media. We also wanted more and more space. In the past, users were satisfied with only few MBs of storage. But now, we calculate our storage space with Tera Bytes! But, the question is, how long can they store our data?
Researches at Hitachi (Japan) wanted to answer this question. They wanted to build a storage media which can store our data for a very long time even under extreme conditions. So, here come glass chips! They have introduced a new way to store data in small quartz glass blocks in small dots which can be read by a normal optical microscope. Currently, they can store 4 layers of dots which will hold 40 mega bytes of data in a square inch. According to Hitachi, they can easily increase the number of layers. But, if they need to store data we use in the modern world, they’ll need gigabytes of storage space!
The real advantage of this chip is, its really hard to damage it. Even a small scratch can damage a DVD but this glass chip won’t give up easily. It can even hold its data even if we heat it to 1,000 degrees celsius for nearly two hours. Now that’s really cool. We can store our message for the future generation!
According to the researches, it can hold data forever. But remember this… Nothing will live forever. Everything does change with time. These glass chips can be used to store data for a very long time. But one day, they’ll also perish!
- Source phys.org
