Hitachi says it's about to solve our data problems, with the announcement that information could potentially be preserved for hundreds of millions of years if it's laser-encoded onto slabs of quartz glass. The downside -- you can't fit all that much on to each piece.
Hitachi concedes that the technique, developed in collaboration with professor Kiyotaka Miura of Kyoto University, is about longevity and does not tackle the more pressing problem of managing the vast and growing amount of world data. Nevertheless, as it turns out, the chemical properties of a piece of quartz are a bit of an embarrassment for the average hard drive. While the former can (according to experiments carried out at Kyoto University's lab) withstand temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius for two hours and have its information "played" back without "degradation" using an optical microscope, the latter will probably fail within a decade in average conditions. The more old school the data storage method, it seems, the better the chance of survival -- Hitachi says tape (remember that) will last between 15 to 30 years.
Since the method -- which works by imprinting a series of dots in binary code (100 at a time) using femtosecond laser pulses onto four layers of quartz -- can only store around 40MB on an area about 2cm squared and 2mm thick (a hard drive can store a terabit in the same surface area), it's likely to be used for the long-term storage of "historically important items such as cultural artifacts and public documents, as well as data that individuals want to leave for posterity".
Hitachi calls it "CD-level digital data volume" -- but imagine if you could chuck that CD into a burning pool of lava and use it again later. The point is not quantity, it's quality. The quartz glass is basically impervious (unless you smash it) -- it can withstand water and magnetism and still function. "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 Hitachi researcher Kazuyoshi Torii.
Hitachi says that as society continues its rapidly accelerating shift from paper to digital data, there should be a long-term storage option like this. Artefacts like the Dead Sea Scrolls need to be stored in special temperature-controlled rooms -- Hitachi's method is the future-proof version of this for your data. The method is, however, going to preliminary be aimed at companies with "large amounts of important data to preserve, rather than individuals," said Hitachi spokesperson Tomiko Kinoshita. The company believes that by 2015 the system will be commercially viable and companies will be able to send data to Hitachi for conversion.
It's a shame the technique will not be immediately accessible to everyone. It would be nice if everyone had the chance to get one thing down for perpetuity -- to put down one piece of information and limit yourself to selecting only the most important details of your life, in the same manner that projects like This Is Your Jam ask you to sum up your mood/taste with one song, could prove an interesting exercise. Like TIYJ, the new technique is about only choosing the best, which is subjective, so perhaps their should be a few global questionnaires on how the method could be used to store some of the world's most precious data for future generations.
The technique, developed from Hitachi's own laser tomography storage system, devised back in 2009, is being slated as a "semi-permanent" storage system for digital data (we'd like to see what the company comes up for the permanent spectrum, considering they already have the next few hundred million years covered). A spokesperson will go into more detail on the technology and its potential uses at the International Symposium on Optical Memory in Tokyo on September 30.
Image: Quartz - Japan-Law Twin / <a rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeff-o-matic/">Striving to a goal</a> / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">CC BY-NC-ND 2.0</a>