The window for Blu-ray success is rapidly closing (see Blu-ray is dead. Heckuva job, Sony!). Which means that 50 GB writable disks will never cost $0.35 a piece.
What is a storage hungry consumer to do?
Massive removable/transportable storage
Together cheap CD/DVD media, thumb drives and ever-growing file sizes killed floppies, Zip drives and all the other removable magnetic disk media. Removable optical media may be next.
Historically, successful PC removable media have stayed in a fairly narrow capacity band relative to hard drives – somewhere between 10x and 50x. If the average PC has a 500 GB hard drive then a removable media between 10 GB and 50 GB is needed.
Dual-layer DVDs are just on the ragged edge of that number while dual layer Blu-ray could handle hard drives up to 2.5 TB. If Blu-ray will never achieve the ubiquity and low cost of DVDs what will fill the gap?
Meet the candidates
Flash drives are a promising alternative. Large capacity thumb drives are available today for about $2/GB. In 2 years those drives will be $.50 a gigabyte or less.
That doesn’t really compare to a Blu-ray writable media at $2 for 50 GB in 2 years, if that comes to pass. But flash drives do have advantages in size weight, ruggedness, and the ubiquity of USB ports.
Cloud storage is another option. For example, Mediasilo offers a service that stores and password protects individual files so the owner can control distribution.
Network bandwidth is the key bottleneck. Countries that have much faster Internet access than the United States could put this to work with some fairly large files. Here in the USA however it won’t be practical for large files for years to come.
Disk drives may be the most promising option. Smaller drives with better shock specs – check out Toshiba’s new 250 GB 1.8 inch drive – could handle just about any transportable application.
If drive vendors would start specifying their drives as an archive medium – even if it’s just five years – they might be able to sew up the home and SOHO archive market. The iVDR initiative is a step in the right direction, but like Blu-ray they are trying to serve too many markets.
Mempile and Inphase, 2 different approaches to high-capacity optical storage, are unlikely successors. Both appear viable for niche markets, but massive investment is required to take them to consumer ubiquity. What app will take them there?
The StorageMojo take
Removable media are the fruit flies of the storage industry: fast breeding and short lives. The pace of innovation is a good thing but a consumer standard needs a 10 year life.
Letting Hollywood drive next-generation media formats doesn’t work. Downloading will supplant physical media for consumers.
There will be no optical replacement for the writable DVD that offers its ubiquity, low cost and interchangeability. Like removable consumer magnetic media, optical has reached a dead end because there is no consumer driver for 250 GB+ optical media.
The good news: consumers will want to archive. There is a huge opportunity for the company that can figure it out.
Courteous comments welcome, of course.
Evidence that disk drives and thumb drives are ready to take this mantle: they’re everywhere. Consumers are buying external disk drives in droves because the price point is right. Mobile drives and thumb drives provide the pocket solution.
Goodnight, optical.
….the fruit flies of the storage industry….ahahah…you crack me up!!
You said it all right here Robin:
“Downloading will supplant physical media for consumers.”
Blu-Ray will have a much smaller niche market than Sony expected unless they get their act together and cut the cost by 75%. Sony has to figure out if they want a high-margin, small market product or a low-margin, huge market product. They’ve probably been thinking they can have it both ways. Betamax redux?
I don’t see “the cloud” providing a general solution for American consumers: with the exception of Verizon, I don’t know of any major broadband provider who isn’t implementing transfer caps or talking about doing so in the future.
Of the ones that are implementing them, they’re all Draconian; Comcast’s is the only large one (250MB), but the price of exceeding their limit for two months is getting denied any service from them for a year (!). The others are talking about $1/GB.
What AT&T will do is unspecified as of yet, they recently switched from “no way!” to “sooner or later”, but like all the others, downloaded video from 3rd parties competes with their triple play Cable TV MK II offerings. In AT&T’s case they’re losing plain DSL customers at twice the rate they’re able to pick up FTTN U-Verse ones and they were after the ones who ignited the Network Neutrality storm when their former CEO Edward Whitacre talked about “Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?”
When you add the psychological barriers caps produce this seems to me to be a non-starter for the foreseeable future unless you are a Verizon customer, or for those broadband providers that start offering it as a service.
I’m also not fond of DVD storage; while I have yet to collect data myself, someone who has a couple of decades of experience in the hard disk field and who has a Fistful of Patents including 3 in every hard drive you own has for years. She says even the best Mitsui now MAM-A gold archival single layer media noticeably degrades over time. It’s just not anywhere near quality basic CD-R media, e.g. normal grade Taiyo Yuden let along archival CD-R media; I’m still using TY CD-Rs for data I really care about.
Bottom line: as more and more people create stuff they REALLY don’t want to lose, i.e. digital photos will be the first big ones, I think, as more people lose them forever due to HD crashes, there will indeed be serious demand for a good solution.
As a keen photographer then archives are a real problem. I’ve already got something approach 1TB, and the only solution which I can make work is to keep it all online and maintain a two or three generations of copies on external HDs using synchronisation (and keeping at least one copy off-site). As long as HD price/GB runs ahead of my ability to generate data, then I can live with it. I’ll automatically get media refresh every few years as technology updates.
I don’t trust optical media – at least not enough to just write it and leave it around for 20 years trusting it will be readable. The idea of writing regularly reading & rewriting removable media and cataloging it every five years or so is not appealing (and probably beyond my abilities to organise).
As for “cloud computing” – the network bandwidth and computing to make this work would be astronomical. It’s not obvious to me it will be cheaper or faster than just maintaining my simple approach of using external drives. If it turns out the external HD gets replaced by something else that plugs into a disk or USB interface later – well it will work just the same.
One possibility that does occur is peer-to-peer synchronisation. It seems to me that for backup purposes, then it doesn’t require data centre capacity; distributed copies over groups of cooperating home server setups could do the job using encryption and redundancy techniques (using parity or multi-generational techniques). Of course that still requires the bandwidth and it would make for an interesting software development project for somebody (plus the appropriate “accounting” system – you would presumably have to contribute at least as much storage to the pool as you wanted backed up remotely).
Addendum: AT&T went from talking about it to a trial in Reno, Nevada (see dslreports.com for more details). They offer up to four speed tiers of plain DSL, from up to 768 Kpbs to 6Mbps, and will be doing caps from 20 to 150GB/month, charging $1/GB over the limit (on the second month you are over, they say they will warn you for the first in this trial, plus when you hit 80% for a month).
Unlike Comcast they will at least provide a meter of what they think you’ve consumed for the month. The caps are more generous than anyone else’s but Comcast, e.g. Frontier (who’s footprint is tiny) is the worst at 5GB/month (sic), although they’ve just started talking about offering higher tiers and Time Warner is 5GB-40GB/month.
Not good (especially for those who can’t buy the higher AT&T tiers, as I was unable to until a couple of months ago), and when you factor in the well established psychological reactions to fixed caps (and for Comcast their “death penalty” vs. $1/GB for going over for everyone else), they will make third party on-line backup a non-starter for the vast majority of US consumers (and while some in the rest of the world have no caps, many have pretty bad ones as well).
Hmmm, I’ve got my “most precious data” segregated into 3 partitions and a most highly compressed Ghost full backup of all three weighs in at 7.5GB, with every two hour incrementals during the day that vary from about 250MB to 425MB total per day. I’d have to *very* carefully look at the behavior of a “fire and forget” on-line service for just these partitions before signing on to one, once AT&T blesses me with this new regime.
I think the standard external USB hard disk for backup looks *very* attractive in comparison, and I imagine most people will continue to use one (after they get burned for the first time), and it is perhaps not a whole lot worse for e.g. irreplaceable photos (which as noted are my current touchstone for backup needs).
While people like you and me want and make removable storage backups as well, I wonder how many else do, or at least would if such storage was big enough and affordable (I outgrew DDS early this decade, and as much as I’d like to go to LTO I just can’t justify the expense).
All,
My wireless ISP (WISP) provides unmetered service so I haven’t been paying much attention to the capping problem. Bottom line: America’s broadband infrastructure sucks. This “regulated duopoly = competition” idea doesn’t work. I hope BO wins and is able to push his broadband program through Congress.
Pete, there is a real market opportunity for archive quality disk drives. They can be slow – 3600 rpm – if that helps drive cost down. This may have to wait for HAMR drives for longevity, but I think we know that prosumers won’t buy tape drives.
Robin
Actually, I WOULD like to buy an LTO-2 tape drive. Then, I could use LTO-1 or LTO-2 tapes, depending on how much I want to back up. LTO-2 tape holds 200GB, right? And they are reusable, unlike DVD-R/DVD+Rs. The DVD Double Layer isn’t rewritable, either, right? I would think if it was ever going to be, that it would have been done by now.
What I don’t understand is why the LTO-2 tape drives haven’t come down in price, now that we’re up to the LTO-4, 2 generations beyond. I guess the manufacturers figure that the market is limited, so they won’t drop prices to try to gain volume. I was hopeful about the DLT-V4, with its 160GB/320GB tape capacity, but it’s pricey, too.
I’m a Systems Administrator at work and one duty is managing our backups, so doing the same at home is not at all daunting to me. I know that it would be for many if not the vast majority of consumers.
BTW, I’m not the writer of the same name.
David Strom: I’m also someone who did sysadmin work before retiring, or at the very least at most small companies I worked at I always ended up doing the backups to make sure they were done and done right ^_^.
Phase change single layer DVD+-RWs are available; according to Wikipedia, a new dual layer DVD-RW2 format is also out there, but I wouldn’t trust anything dual layer quite yet. Finite number of writes (probably 1,000) and will retain data for perhaps 25 years, but those constraints are obviously OK for many backup uses.
As to the industry not driving down the price of LTO drives (and media) to what we can justify for home use, my theory is market segmentation, with DSS (1-4, up to 20GB uncompressed) then DAT 72 (36GB) and in 2007 HP’s 8mm DAT 160 (80GB, and the drives can use DDS-4 and DAT 72 media) aimed at the inexpensive market with LTO, AIT etc. for the enterprise market.
Unfortunately, for someone like Steve Jones with a TB to backup, DDS/DAT is a non-starter, 28 DAT 72 tapes for his already compressed (I assume) data. There is enterprise level backup software out there that only records one copy of anything that stays unmodified, but that’s are clearly intended for MUCH more reliable types of backup media (e.g. for mainframes where tape has been reliable secondary storage for decades). Back when I was using DDS-2 I’d only trust it with many copies.
Tape is probably a dead end for the home market; due to the complex mechanical aspect it’s not the sort of thing that can be made cheap without very high volume, and USB hard disks are already there and “good enough” for the vast majority of people who even bother to backup instead hoping their disk drive lasts until the transfer their data to a newer computer.
Thanks to dslreports.com (http://tinyurl.com/5b7v76) we now know the caps for AT&T’s trials in Reno, Nevada (as you might guess, I’m one of their DSL customers (local cable is not too good for broadband and telcos tend to be a lot more reliable, it’s their culture), so I’m watching this closely):
AT&T Basic (DSL only) Up-to 768 Kbps 20 GB per month
AT&T Express Up-to 1.5 Mbps 40 GB per month
AT&T Pro Up-to 3.0 Mbps 60 GB per month
AT&T Elite Up-to 6.0 Mbps 80 GB per month
AT&T Max (U-verse only) Up-to 10.0 Mbps 150 GB per month
Most of their DSL customers can’t get U-verse (that requires a serious build out with rather large “VRAD” cabinets on curbsides and the like) and I can’t and may never get it, plus you generally can’t get just DSL with U-verse (instead of a double or triple play including cable, which I don’t want at any price).
Most discouraging, 80GB/month (2.6GB/day, for which you have to pay $35-40/month, and as noted previously plenty of their customers can only get the lowest two tiers) is a non-starter for network backup if you’re doing anything else with your line. This puts them much closer to Time Warner (max 40GB/month) than Comcast….
Looks like the ball will be in the court of the storage industry for this.
I don’t really have much to say on the subject of this article except, Blu-Ray should have gone away before it was released… I didn’t really expect it to stay around anyway. Sony tried hyping it way to fast and (might just be my opinion) paid Hollywood big fish to carry them….
As for the caps on downloading with broadband…. I have 7 PC’s at any given time at least 4 of my kids are online… playing games or surfing doing …D/l’ing from itunes…homework… something with the PC.. I know in a 1 month span of time there is SEVERAL GiGs get downloaded here. Put me in the mix… I work with extremely large files …databases mostly but also software evals and video conferencing… I’ll D/L a 2GB DB for repair or modification and upload it to back to my customer in a day… and I’ll do this a few times a week!
My point.. if my ISP were to start charging me per GB I would end up with a $500/mo internet bill easily….
For that much I would rather drop my ISP and getting a fractional or full T1 to my home.
Couple of points from your neighbourhgood consumer. (Sony pay attention)
I have hnudreds of DVD’s. I’m not giving up my collection because Sony decides it wants to up it’s prpofit margin.
I have a large HD Plasma TV. My DVD’s look great and I run them at 1080p thanks to upscaling. Why would I buy a product that is supposedly better if I’m quite happy with the quality. All I want to do is watch a movie now and then. I don’t live in front of my TV and I don’t live in Antartica! It doesn’t bug me that much.
Finally and this is the clincher. Optical technology sucks including DVD etc. It’s useless as a storage medium which means I am basically buying vinyl LP’s when I buy a DVD or Bluray disc. Right now I could go out and buy a 500Gb Seagate removable drive that would store 125 DVD movies reliably probably for at least the next hundred years. What needs to happen is the solid state technology prices (USB.thumb drives come down and you simply buy the movies on a USB key which you can then transfer to a hard drive as required.