Nano-technologists have currently designed and engineered a storage disk that may store data for 1,000,000 years or additional. The point frame is nearly incomprehensible compared to the present magnetic laborious disks that may store knowledge for simply over a decade.
Back in 1956, IBM was the primary company within the world to introduce an advertisement laptop capable of storing knowledge on a memory device drive. The IBM 305 RAMAC used fifty 24-inch discs to store up to five MB of knowledge. Today, laborious drives haven't any drawback storing knowledge with general capacities of one TB obtainable on a three.5-inch disk. Despite this huge increase in storage capability, things haven’t very modified. The lifetime of knowledge that may be hold on on magnetic discs remains some ten years. The question is, however will we tend to preserve data on a timescale larger than that?
Well, Jeroen DE Vries at the University of Twente within the The Netherlands and colleagues have designed and engineered a disk capable of storing knowledge over one million years. they need performed accelerated ageing tests showing that the disk ought to be ready to store knowledge for one million years and perhaps longer.
The idea behind fast the method of ageing is predicated round the undeniable fact that knowledge should be hold on in Associate in Nursing energy minimum that's separated from alternative minima by Associate in Nursing energy barrier. thus to corrupt knowledge by changing a zero to a one, for instance, needs enough energy to beat this barrier. The chance that the system can jump during this method is ruled by a principle referred to as Svante August Arrhenius law. This relates the chance of jumping the barrier with factors like temperature and therefore the Boltzmann constant and the way usually a jump are often created, that is relative to the amount of atomic vibrations.
Calculations reveal for knowledge to last 1,000,000 years, the specified energy barrier is sixty three KBT or seventy KBT to last a billion years. “These values square measure well among the vary of today’s technology,” say DE Vries. To prove now, the team engineered a disk capable of storing data for this era of your time. the information is hold on within the pattern of lines incised into a skinny metal disc so coated with a protecting layer.
The metal they used was wolfram, that they selected due to its high melting temperature (3,422 degrees C) and low thermal enlargement constant. The protecting layer used is Si compound (Si3N4), chosen due to its high resistance to fracture and its low thermal enlargement constant.
The disk was mistreatment normal patterning techniques and hold on knowledge within the sort of QR codes with lines 100nm wide. The disk was then heated at varied temperatures to check however the information would be affected. The results, though dispensed in specific laboratory conditions, square measure spectacular. in keeping with Svante August Arrhenius law, a disk capable of living 1,000,000 years should survive one hour at 445 Kelvin, a check that the new disks passed with no issues.
Actually, the disks survived temperatures up to 848 Kelvin, though with major amounts of data loss. That compares well with the Rosetta Project, a proposal by the Long currently Foundation to make deposit materials capable of storing knowledge for periods larger than ten,000 years.
This suggests we tend to could to be ready to preserve a big quantity of data for future man mistreatment this method.
