The drive stores up to 360 terabytes of data and can withstand temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. If you want your data to stay safe until the Sun goes out, store it in a “five-dimensional mnemonic crystal,” say the technology’s originators at the University of Southampton in Britain.
As a demonstration, they stored the entire human genome in a crystal that they say will last for billions of years. The data could be used to resurrect the human species thousands or millions of years after its eventual extinction, the research team suggests in a statement.
Data is recorded with a laser beam that creates tiny gaps in the crystal, a transparent disc of quartz a few centimeters in diameter.
These gaps, just 20 nanometers wide, are called five-dimensional because the system records their position in three-dimensional coordinates along with two additional dimensions, their width and length.
Quartz is an extremely durable material, and the researchers’ claims are probably true, since in 2014 the flash drive entered the Guinness World Records as the most durable data storage medium.
The drive stores up to 360 terabytes of data and can withstand temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. It is also resistant to radiation and does not break even if it receives impacts with a force of 10 tons per square centimeter, its creators assure.
