A new storage support, a bit on the expensive side though…
Saturday, July 21st, 2012 by Roberto Saracco
A sapphire you may want to use to store your data...
Clearly, if you had to go to a jewel store to buy your disk for storing data you would expect it to be on the expensive side. And this is what would be the case if for storing your data you decide to use a sapphire.
Why would you want to do that? According to Patrick Charton, a researcher at the French Nuclear Waste Management, a disk made of two thin slices of sapphire that sandwich platinum dots is the best way to preserve your data for a very long time. Actually, up to 10 million years! That is quite a feat indeed, considering that those data you have trusted to a compact disk will disappear within a few decades. Manufacturers used to claim a longevity of up to 30 years for CDs and 100 years for DVD. The reality is quite different. Data may start to become corrupted after 2 years if you are unlucky and anyhow you may not trust them to survive more than 30 years at best. In my personal experience I discovered corrupted files on CDs (containing photos…) after 6 years, and that was not a nice discovery. Luckily, I made three copies so I started to re-back up them.
You won’t have significantly better hope for longevity if you are using a magnetic storage.
At a personal level I doubt that anyone of us is really keen to use a storage media that can preserve data for ten million years and therefore I suspect there will be little mass market for a disc costing 25,000 $!
It is a storage imagined for posterity, assuming there will be someone out there to read it in 10 million years! Also, I wonder what software will be available to read the disc 
.
Tags: storage