Storage capacity may have grown but the method of saving it has not.
It's still magnetic media that can be easily magnetized, zapped, erased or subject to decay. A CD-ROM will disintegrate. A hard disk platter can be wrecked by a speck of dust. And paper burns. That's why anthropologists have to settle for reading stone carvings and painted hieroglyphics, since the library of Alexandria has been dust for millennia.
However, MIT Technology Review reports a scientist named Jeroen de Vries at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and his team have designed and built a disk capable of storing data for more than one million years without the media decaying, and they've performed accelerated aging tests to prove it.
Data is stored on media in 0s and 1s and there must be an energy barrier between each digit. When this barrier is breached, data becomes corrupted. de Vries and his team did calculations based on some science and math beyond most of us mere mortals and determined they would need 63 KBT (a measure of thermal energy) to make the barrier last a million years, or 70 KBT to last a billion years. "These values are well within the range of today's technology," de Vries said.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon