What would you say if told you there is a hard drive you can buy that will last essentially forever? A hard drive that will not require a back up, or data recovery, ever! Impossible? Well, it is not available as of yet and may never be. But, Science Magazine has at least figured out how to make a hard drive that will last forever, or at least a million years.
How do you produce a hard drive that will last a million years? Build it with sapphire. Okay simple enough. Roadblock: the price tag of $30,000! This is of course still in the concept mode. Another roadblock: it will be thousands of years until the hard drive comes out. This whole project came out because nuclear waste repositories needed a way to catalog where they buried waste for the future. So, they wanted to be able to put the information on hard drives but not have them crash, losing valuable data and requiring emergency data recovery.
Wouldn’t that be great to come up with a proof of concept any time you needed something done? Cook breakfast for 5 children? Build a breakfast robot. Need to defend 2 people in basketball. Eject extra 2 hands from your uniform. Color your iPhone? Hey, wait a minute, we do that. Yes, iPhone color conversions. We invented that one. Shameless plug, I know.
Until the million-year hard drive comes out, make sure to continue to back up your files. Hard drives will continue to fail since there are so many moving parts inside, and the only protection you have to protect your data elsewhere if disaster strikes.
