In this modern age of information technology the storage of information and data has become crucial and the data storage technology is evolving rapidly. You now have flash drives and hard disks that can store more and more data but it is always considered prudent to have a backup in some other device in case the hard disk crashes. A team of scientists have developed a most expensive hard disk that is rather hard as it is made from sapphire and they claim that it will survive along with the data for 1 million years. The prototype disk has cost as much as $30,000 making it the most expensive hard disk.
Some people might ask as to why someone would want to store data for a million years? It is the nuclear waste repositories who required to preserve records of buried nuclear waste, their quantities and their exact location. And they need to keep this information safely stored not only for the near future but for tens of thousands of years when it might become crucial information for future archeologists. At present we don’t have a digital format that can guarantee to store the data safely for so long. The waste management agency ANDRA had commissioned this project and the ultimate hard disk has been created. It is a sapphire disk which has information engraved on it using platinum.
In Which Language to Store the Information?
There are two thin disks of industrial sapphire but the data is etched in platinum onto one side of only one disk. The other disk is placed on top as if to make a sandwich. The two disks are molecularly fused together. The scientists are testing its durability by immersing the disk in acid. It is likely that the disk would survive a million years but they can’t guarantee that the future inhabitants of the earth will be able to read it. The scientists are not sure in which language to write it in. There have been off hand suggestions of using pictures and photographs instead of any script or numbers.