Hitachi glass plates for "perpetual" data storage

The Japanese company Hitachi introduced a new type of optical media capable of storing information "hundreds of millions of years." Thin plates of transparent quartz glass withstand temperatures up to 1000 ° C for several hours, waterproof, resistant to chemical reagents. The binary code is recorded by a laser in four layers of dots, which are visible in a conventional optical microscope.

In terms of resistance to external effects, quartz glass is an order of magnitude better than all existing information carriers, such as CDs, DVDs, SSDs, or magnetic disks: their material degrades after a few decades, a maximum of 100 years.

Of course, Hitachi cannot guarantee that after millions of years there will be a reader for quartz disks, and people will be able to extract information from a binary code.
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An experimental sample of a Hitachi carrier has a size of 2x2 cm and a thickness of 2 mm. So far, the information is recorded only in four layers with a density of 40 megabytes per square inch, that is, about 25 MB is placed on such a plate, but with commercial use the glass thickness and the number of layers can be easily increased.

The glass plate does not react with almost any chemicals; test tubes and other laboratory glassware are made of the same material. Destroying information can only be broken plate, which is also not very easy to do, given the strength of fused silica.

Researchers from Hitachi believe that such media can be in demand from government agencies and museums.