Scientists in Japan have come up with a way to store data in little slivers of quartz glass.
UC Santa Cruz’s Director for the Center of Research in Intelligent Storage Ethan Miller told Scientific American:
“If both readers and writers can be produced at a reasonable price, this has the potential to greatly change archival storage systems.”
It may be extremely expensive now, but the price will go down with competition, use, and the perfection of mass production techniques.
Kyoto University’s Kiyotaka Miura developed the “semi-perpetual” pieces of quartz glass for Hitachi.
The process starts with a quartz glass square just two centimeters in width and a two millimeters thick. Four different layers of binary-based dots are then inlaid into thin layer of crystal by using pulses of light.
Laser-based readers can scan and pick up information using this format. Also, the binary-based dots can be seen inside the thin quartz glass by using a simple microscope.
According to Engadget, the data, once inlaid inside the quartz glass, can then be read out with an optical microscope. This means that future generations could restore the info without needing a proprietary drive.
The data inlaid inside the quartz glass could literally last through the ages. Hitachi said that the data has withstood two hours of 3500 degree Fahrenheit temperatures in testing without data loss.
According to the research lab, this new technology could come out on the market in about three years. However, it would more than likely be targeted at companies first.
This quartz glass technology is truly a unique step forward for science today.
I can’t wait to see what the future holds.