Researcher Jeroen de Vries, University of Twente in Netherlands, has developed a new optical storage device.
The new unit is made of tungsten and silicon nitride (nitride
- nitrogen compounds of metals and some non-metals), which should provide data
storage for an extremely long time - it is estimated that up to a billion
years.
Hard drives are very
sensitive to external magnetic fields and mechanical faults and normal life
expectancy is much longer than 10 years, such as CDs, DVDs and flash drives ,
each has its own Achilles heel. “The researcher decided to solve this problem
by proposing their own storage devices. Chose materials such as tungsten, which
can withstand very high temperatures, encapsulated in silicon nitride, which is
highly resistant to breakage and deformation. Intends to do as hard disk that
could be used to store important data of the human race and for conservation
despite death for civilization ".
The device stores
information through QR codes in tungsten, which can easily decode smartphones
today. each pixel code itself is also a second set of much smaller QR codes .
The investigator put the device at a temperature of 200 ° C for one hour and it
was observed that showed no visible degradation. The device is damaged only to
approximately 440 ° C, but the data is still readable.
