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Hitachi's glass chip  (Source: http://phys.org/)
The chips can last hundreds of millions of years and endure harsh conditions

Ditch the CDs and MP3s -- Hitachi has created a tiny piece of quartz glass that's capable of storing digital information for a few hundred million years.

Hitachi's little slivers of quartz glass are only two centimeters square and two millimeters thick. They store data in binary via the creation of layers of dots (four layers, to be exact) and  can hold 40 MB per square inch. 

I know what you're thinking -- how can a small piece of glass last a few hundred million years? The quartz glass material is capable of withstanding some harsh conditions like water (tsunamis), heat (high temperature flames and heat up to 1,000 degrees Celsius for two hours), radio waves and most chemicals. 

"The volume of data being created every day is exploding, but in terms of keeping it for later generations, we haven't necessarily improved since the days we inscribed things on stones," said Kazuyoshi Torii, a Hitachi researcher. "The possibility of losing information may have actually increased."

These chips have real potential to replace CDs and hard drives, which have a lifespan of a few decades to a century at most. 

According to Hitachi, the chips could initially be used for museums, government agencies and religious organizations. 

Source: Phys.org


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By cashkennedy on 9/25/2012 6:14:19 PM , Rating: 2
With only 40mb per square inch, it will not be of much use. Perhaps if they make it 10x that it will be pratical.

Or just sell it to governments to store records on, most still use billion dollar tape systems they signed 20 year contracts on in the late 80's and pay over 100 dollars per gb.




By Nortel on 9/25/2012 7:14:23 PM , Rating: 2
This is more of a proof of concept. In 2001 a space odyssey, star trek, etc... they all used clear glass rectangles to store data so for this to be real, is just too cool.


By Mint on 9/25/2012 10:15:47 PM , Rating: 2
It's not great, but it's not that bad. If you wrote the data on 100 micron thick glass, it would hold about 300GB per kilogram, and it's a pretty cheap material. I'm sure the technology has at least an order of magnitude room for improvement, too, given that this is just a research product.

I think a couple petabytes is enough for future historians to comb through to get an idea of what our society was like.


By Gideonic on 9/26/2012 3:34:21 AM , Rating: 2
Yeah it's good enough to store most valuable text and images, science articles, what not. Backuping pornhub though could turn out to be a problem ...


By FITCamaro on 9/26/2012 8:35:28 AM , Rating: 3
It's a good start. And I think its awesome.


By GotThumbs on 9/26/2012 9:05:56 AM , Rating: 2
Way to NOT use your imagination for future uses/capacity limits. It's a new and evolving technology.

Remember back when computers fist had 100MB Hard Drives and now you can get 3T & $T drives. SSD are maturing and increasing in size. This may just be the next evolution in long-term storage.

Give it time and lets see where it goes.


By JediJeb on 9/26/2012 11:07:47 PM , Rating: 2
I must be really old, my first PC only had a 20MB hard drive :) I later bought a 250MB hard drive for something like $400, don't we miss those days.


By MrBlastman on 9/26/2012 3:26:34 PM , Rating: 2
This is pretty rad and remember, it is just the beginning. Technologies start small and then they explode in ability once new minds get involved with them. The reasoning behind it is legitimately valid. Apart from the gold-plated disc inside the Voyager space probes, we don't have much around these days that will stand the test of time for future societies or alien civilizations.


Couple of comments
By XZerg on 9/25/2012 6:27:39 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Ditch the CDs and MP3s

MP3s? what does that have to do with storage technologies. You mean CDs and Flash drives?

This is awesome. Comparatively CDs have at best of 10 years or so lifespan and USBs are not far off that either, and even less if kept out in the open. Sure the space isn't much when you just consider a square inch capacity but then again floppy disks, hard drives, flash drives, sd cards, ... they didn't start off big either. So time will definitely improve capacity. Also if they were to make a drive length and width similar to 3.5" drives, then we could easily put about 500MB+ which is somewhat respectable.

Add in multi-layers and some more squeezing and you are talking in GBs.




RE: Couple of comments
By BurnItDwn on 9/25/2012 7:02:24 PM , Rating: 2
What do you mean CDs have 10 years at best of lifespan?

I have cds from late 80s as well as from the 90s and they seem to all be working ok....


RE: Couple of comments
By robertisaar on 9/25/2012 7:14:52 PM , Rating: 3
those are pressed disks, which do seem to have a relatively long shelf life, at leat compared to the burned disks you'll find in consumer usage for data storage.


RE: Couple of comments
By ShaolinSoccer on 9/26/2012 3:58:31 AM , Rating: 2
Reminds me of all those people who drive around with their CD's stuffed into sleeves on their sun visor. Not only are they scratching the CD's with each slide, the sun is beating on them. Great way to take years off your CD's...


But...
By Strunf on 9/26/2012 7:33:44 AM , Rating: 2
"The quartz glass material is capable of withstanding some harsh conditions like water (tsunamis), heat (high temperature flames and heat up to 1,000 degrees Celsius for two hours), radio waves and most chemicals."

The problem I see is not so much the material but the interface, good luck finding an adapter that can read your piece of glass 100 years after it becomes obsolete. The only good way to keep your data "forever" is to maintain a "regular" update of its storage medium, it's what I do with my backups, first it was CD, then PATA HD, now SATA HD, the plus side with this is that with each update the physical space your backup takes gets smaller, as in my 10 PATA disks all fit inside a single SATA one.




RE: But...
By FaaR on 9/26/2012 3:00:00 PM , Rating: 2
A reader could "easily" be reverse-engineered by another high-technology society that happen to find these glass archives. Now, dechipering any language(s) and meaning of written texts is likley going to be a much bigger problem than simply reading the data itself...


RE: But...
By JediJeb on 9/26/2012 11:17:23 PM , Rating: 3
Not just the language of the stored data, but the format of the data files themselves. If you have old data stored from an Atari computer can you now read it with a Windows machine, even if you can interface to the disk? Even stored as ASCII text the data may not be easily readable in the future if that format is lost somewhere along the way.

Binary may be a universal way to write digital data, but it still gets interpreted differently by different systems.


Isolinear Chips
By SuckRaven on 9/25/2012 7:23:06 PM , Rating: 4
Sort of looks like a baby Isolinear Chip from Star Trek TNG. =)




RE: Isolinear Chips
By FITCamaro on 9/26/2012 8:36:38 AM , Rating: 2
I'm still waiting for when we can write entire "subroutines" with the press of a few buttons on a console. ;)


Ease of writing/rewriting
By BifurcatedBoat on 9/25/2012 9:02:00 PM , Rating: 2
For these to replace hard drives, they'd have to be very easy to write to/overwrite existing data. I didn't see anything in the information from the company that suggests these are useful as anything but read-only media, and there was no discussion of the process it goes through to embed the data in the quartz.




RE: Ease of writing/rewriting
By Mint on 9/25/2012 10:18:42 PM , Rating: 3
The purpose of this is for archiving through extreme conditions and time scales, not replacing HDDs.


By alpha754293 on 9/26/2012 11:16:53 AM , Rating: 2
Predecessor to Star Trek technology?




Star Trek: First Contact...
By loganSLC on 9/26/2012 7:11:55 PM , Rating: 2
When the Phoenix launches, and Steppenwolf plays, that disc is the first thing I thought of...




By ScotterQX6700 on 9/26/2012 11:09:37 PM , Rating: 2
Is anyone else bothered by the inconsistent units of measurement in this paragraph:
"Hitachi's little slivers of quartz glass are only two centimeters square and two millimeters thick. They store data in binary via the creation of layers of dots (four layers, to be exact) and can hold 40 MB per square inch."




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