Comments on: Optical nearing the end of the line

By: Sam

Sam — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:48:03 +0000

Optical media is the only distribution format that is guaranteed to be available. There is no other technology that is cheap to mass distribute. Let’s say you wanted to distribute content to 100 people, how is that even possible with usb drives being as expensive as they are; would you give 100 hard drives to each of those people? No, you would place them on 13 cent dvds and then hand them out. What I’m trying to say is that no one storage medium fits all needs, so you can expect optical to last a very long time until some other media as replaceable, cheap and effective as optical media comes along.

By: KD Mann

KD Mann — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:48:51 +0000

Robin…re:

“Anyone interested in buying a vintage USB Zip drive?”

Will you take my Parallel Printer port Zip drive in trade?

KDM

By: gpshead

gpshead — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:00:40 +0000

“”"You’ll buy HD 3D content online, download it, store it in your digital library, and watch it when and where you want. If your house burns down your content suppliers will let you download again.”"”

I’m not convinced that you’ll store it locally in the long term. Network speeds and transmission costs are continually declining. Devices may well cache content locally but I think the consumer awareness of this will diminish as an unnecessary implementation detail.

If your house burns down destroying your devices ideally a consumer won’t need to think about going and re-downloading content. Your new device would simply ask for your credentials and everything you had will become available nearly instantly as the network connection will often be faster than the content bitrate.

By: Graham Irving

Graham Irving — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:40:43 +0000

That really depends on your point of view and your storage requirements.
If a low price and high capacity are the top priorities for you, current optical storage products are most likely not a good fit for you.
If your top priorities include high reliability/durability, removable media, ANSI/ISO standards, long media life, WORM or erasable formats, zero power when idle, and a non-proprietary platform independent interchangeable file system (ISO-9660 or UDF), you will most likely find optical to be a good fit.

As with most storage technologies, they are continuously changing and evolving, including optical.
In terms of consumer optical storage, currently both the CD and DVD discs are slowly being displaced by the newer Blu-Ray discs.
For professional optical storage, SONY recently discontinued their last MO product, leaving ASTI/Plasmon’s UDO products as the only choice for cartridged media.

If optical is nearing the end of the line, why are companies like GE and InPhase researching and developing the next generation of optical products?

It’s OK, if not important, to be able to choose from a wide range of storage products based on different storage technologies.
I wonder what the modern world would be like if the only digital storage product was spinning magnetic disk?

By: Russell G

Russell G — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:29:00 +0000

The huge problem with USB drives is their reliability. Just read through the reviews of any USB drive on the market and you’ll see the same horror stories again and again.

I switched to USB drives for backups several years ago, happily getting rid of all my old tapes and backup DVD discs. But since that time, I’ve had my two USB backup drives die no less than six times, usually after about 6-10 months. Each time, Seagate replaced them because they were still in the five year warranty, but each time, I lost all data on the drive and had to deal with the hassle of mailing it back to Seagate and waiting on a replacement.

Every time a drive failed, it was because of problems with the USB system in the case — the actual drive inside was fine. But short of voiding the warranty by removing the drive inside, the end result was the same to me — lost data.

I’m still searching for a good solution for backups outside the PC — and online storage isn’t it either, IMHO. For the moment, the best solution seems to be swapping out internal drives — big pain, but at least they’re reliable.

By: Joerg M.

Joerg M. — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:12:56 +0000

Optical disk have a huge advantage. When the electronics surrounding the disc isn’t functional any longer, you press the eject button (or search your emergency eject paper clip), buy a new drive and put it into your device. With a hard disk you need a dust free room. It’s this separation making this media interesting.

I will never trust hard disks as an media for my long time backups. And i wouldn’t trust any network backup service without having a regular scheduled copy in a safe-deposit box

By: Jeff Darcy

Jeff Darcy — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:30:09 +0000

You forgot one criterion: durability. Many optical technologies survived much longer than you’d think because of durability. It’s easy to forget that now, when sunlight can make a ten-cent CD-R unreadable within days. The technology and economics have also shifted in other ways that make optical less appealing, though. For example, a combination of de-dup, Reed-Solomon encoding, and cheap nearline magnetic media can make VTLs much more appealing than they’d be without that combination. Soon those near-line drives will be using HAMR, which is a direct descendant of M-O, and PCM might still make a dent in flash-like applications, so some kinds of optical technology will undoubtedly live on, but I think you’re right that pure optical storage has reached a dead end (unless there’s another fundamental breakthrough).