Traditional “Hard Disk Drives” (HDD) last for some years, if they are quality and defect-free units, but French researchers and designers are working on some kind of completely different storage medium: a disk that’s hard, that’s made of sapphire and that should last for million of years to let the offspring of humanity know that there is nuclear waste buried beneath the ground.
The sapphire “hard disk” prototype has been created by ANDRA, the French nuclear waste management agency: the unit (one of its kind) costs 25,000 dollars to make, and stores information with platinum-based etchings. The disk itself is actually made up of two different disks (20 cm across) of industrial-grade sapphire molecularly fused together.
