Hitachi Invents Technology to Record Data for Forever on Quartz Glass

Hitachi, the Japanese electronics giant unveiled a method of storing data that could be stored for a long time. It’s a technique to store digital information on quartz glass without any degradation. This glass can bear high temperature and will not degrade in hostile conditions. The glass is made from highly resilient material which is unaffected by radio waves. Moreover, it is water proof and can survive fire and tsunami as well.

According to Hitachi there are several methods to store data - on disk drives, memory chips and optical media. But these methods are not sufficient for mass storage and can be easily destroyed. 

Researchers said keeping large volume of data has become a problem as the amount of data is increasing every day and storing the data for the next generation is a difficult task to handle.

To prevent the confidential data from falling into the wrong hands, Hitachi unveiled technology in which data is stored in a binary form by creating dots in very thin sheet of quartz glass. This data can be read only with the help of an optical microscope. As long as devices to read binary data exist, the data will be readable.

This glass holds four layers of dotted data in which data is stored and it contains 40 MB per square inch. Hitachi is planning to increase more number of layers to store large amounts of data. Researchers said data will last for longer until and unless this hard glass is broken by a hammer or rock.