Hitachi, working in partnership with a Japanese university, has announced that it has developed a means of preserving its archives, possibly for hundreds of millions of years.
In a joint project with Kyoto University's Kiyotaka Miura, the electronics giant has developed a prototype data storage unit using quartz glass according to Scientific American.
The prototype, a square of quartz two centimetres wide and two millimetres thick, houses four layers of dots that are created with a femtosecond laser, which produces extremely short pulses of light. As these dots are embedded into the crystal, they shouldn't be effected by surface erosion.
The dots represent binary information, which should be comprehensible even into the distant future and can be real with a optical microscope. The quartz renders the medium resistant to chemicals and weathering, and can withstand 1 000 degree heat for about two hours.
As an added plus this medium has a storage density slightly better than CDs, and additional layers would increase that density.
For the rest of the story go read it on Scientific American.
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