If You Want Your Music to Last a Million Years, Try This Storage Format

Researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have come up with a magnetic disk storage system that they say will store data for a million years.  This improves on current systems by a factor of about…a million.

The hard discs we all use today apparently will degrade and lose their ability to hold data in about a decade.  But by creating grooves in thin tungsten discs covered wtih silicon nitride, these boffins were able to manufacture something that could hold data even if the discs were heated to 445 degrees Kelvin (172 C)–for an hour.  The discs even did well at 848 K (545 C!) before some data loss was found.

It’ll be a while before (if ever!) these discs are ever used for anything other than data vital to the existence of mankind.  But you just know someone is going to burn a Lady Gaga album onto one these things, right?

(Via Gizmodo)