Sick of Hard Drives failing? This sapphire disk has you covered!

As they are known, hard disk aren't the most reliable things in the world, sometimes failing just weeks after you've bought them, however the technology that is being incorporated in recent years has propelled the storage market, but this new edition will revolutionize the way we see storage.

The project originated in nuclear waste repositories and realised they needed a reliable way of storing the records of where they had buried the waste, and with nuclear half lives being hundreds of thousand of years a tradition Hard Disk Drive was out of the question.

Scientist set out to find a material that would allow data to be stored for a significant amount of time. Sapphire was the material of choice with the data being etched in platinum. The two disks will then come together to form an information sandwich, which are then molecularly fused together. To ensure the disks would be suitable for sustained used the disks were immersed in acid to simulate aging and is said to last 1 million years.

This may sound like an amazing idea but there are two drawbacks. First off, a prototype costs a staggering $30,000 and second, if you need to preserve data for use in tens of thousands of years, what language do you use? How about pictures instead?

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