New high-tech diamond-hard stone DVD will purportedly last 1,000 years

Nov 13, 2009 11:48 GMT  ·  By

After years and years of hoping for a working solution for digital archiving, relative newcomer to the IT industry Cranberry seems to have given professionals, businesses, non-profit and governmental offices the solution they want for a better archiving system. Cranberries' DiamondDisc DVD was allegedly designed to successfully preserve scribed data for a millennium.

The new disk is supposedly diamond-hard, can withstand temperatures of up to 176 degrees, UV light and normal material degradation. Apart from that, it is a normal-capacity DVD (4.7 GB) and can be read by any normal DVD drives. David McInnis, founder of Cranberry DiamondDisc, claims to have found the cure to the maladies of the digital-DVD age in the low-tech Stone Age. Truthfully, the scientists that lay the foundation for the technology (or rediscovered it) are professors at the Brigham Young University. What they did was test out the “stone-carved” technology, which the foresighted McInnis immediately licensed.

"Considering the combination of the Cranberry Disc's test results and its rock-like data layer, it is reasonable to conclude that the Cranberry Disc has a greater longevity and durability than other competitors media claim a 300-year shelf life," the company said.

The tests referred to by the spokesperson would be nothing short of certain death for regular storage disks. The researchers tested the disk using an ECMA379 temperature and humidity (85°C / 85%) and combined that with the exposure to the full spectrum of natural light. The Cranberry DiamondDisc became the only type in existence to have withstood this rigorous testing.

Although certainly a breakthrough, especially with being readable by conventional means, there is a major downside that will make the new Diamond DVDs hard to afford. "The Cranberry DiamonDisc is playable on most regular DVD drives today and will last as far into the future as we can imagine," McInnis says, but that doesn't go for its scribing.

To etch the hard surface, only the technology developed by the creators can be used, and the cost is quite huge. Specifically, a Cranberry Disc Writer plus 150 blank CranberryDiscs are available for $4,995, while a single 4.7GB disc costs $34.95. To solve this problem, the company created a safe online file uploader. Customers can purchase their disks online and then upload or mail their files to Cranberry, which will, in turn, scribe the contents and mail the DVDs back. Cranberry has exclusive rights to the development and marketing of this technology.

This breakthrough may eventually replace the huge archives full of drawers and paper files with rooms filled with such optical disks, although that day is certainly still far away.