TDK recently demo’d an impressive technical achievement: a 10 layer optical disk with 320 GB capacity – using standard Blu-ray (BD) drive technology. Each layer has better than 90% light transmission and writing required no more than 20 mW of the 30 mW Blu-ray spec.
Too bad it will never be a commercial success. Optical is at the end of the line.
When do formats die?
When their combination of reliability, capacity, performance, density and cost aren’t competitive. Which is where optical is now – even 320 GB optical.
Some of you may remember punched paper tape – hot in the 60s and early 70s – and popular on 16 bit minicomputers back when 4k of RAM was respectable and 64k unaffordable. It was limited to a few dozen KB of capacity and unreliable in long-term use, so when 240KB 8†floppies arrived in 1973 paper tape was toast.
Floppies had to improve to compete with removable disk pack drives – like DEC’s RK05 family – with their 2 MB capacity and a screaming 150 KB/sec transfer rate, and floppies did by increasing capacity – what TDK demonstrated – and decreasing size, from 8†to 5.25†to 3.5â€, and cost from over a thousand dollars for a drive to less than $20.
But floppies couldn’t keep up with the growing size of applications and data sets. The 100 MB Zip drive was insanely popular when introduced in 1994 – a woman offered me a $100 premium on the spot to buy mine at a Palo Alto sushi bar – but by 1999 the format was on the way out thanks to cheaper and more capacious CD-R drives.
Despite heroic efforts to increase removable magnetic disk capacities – culminating in 2001 with the 5.7 GB Orb drive – removable magnetic disk media is dead, killed by cheaper optical and more convenient flash media.
Removable: backup and transfer
Removable media has 2 major use cases: data backup and data transfer. Tape dominates removable media backup today with capacities rivaling the largest disks.
Thumb drives long ago replaced floppies for smaller file transfers – “sneakernet†– with external hard drives handling large capacities. With 1 TB 2.5†hard drives, even a writeable 50 GB Blu-ray (BD-R) can’t compete with a small hard drive in transfer speed or capacity.
TDK’s problem
Which gets us to the 10x Blu-ray problem: even if it were commercialized there would be no market. Why?
- Capacity. Successful optical media capacities have been competitive with current disks – CD-ROM in the early 90s; DVD-R in the early 2000s. Multi-layer Blu-ray will never be more than a small fraction of hard drive capacities.
- Performance. 24x Blu-ray transfer rates are half that of today’s disks. And as capacities increase, disks get faster. Not so with Blu-ray.
- Reliability. Early adopters report that BD burner disks often don’t play on many commercial players. That will get fixed someday, but multi-layer DB-R will have to solve it again.
- Density. Managing a single piece of media is much simpler than managing 6 or 10. External hard drive density makes them much more convenient.
- Cost. BD-playing DVD drives haven’t been popular on PCs, and BD burners are way more expensive, as is the media. A FireWire or USB 2 or 3 hard drive can be had for less than $100, has much faster access times, higher capacity and faster data transfer. With volume BD-R costs will come down – but where will the volume come from?
Multi-layer BD-R has advantages, especially if current BD players can be updated to use it. But there is no commercial justification for distributing content on 320 GB optical disks and there isn’t likely to be one.
Hollywood has a real chance to make 3D work this time, but 3D HD movies will fit fine on BD. Put a 3D “Band of Brothers†on a single disk? OK, but really, getting up every 50 minutes to change disks isn’t so hard, is it?
The Storage Bits take
New optical formats will get introduced – like 750 MB Zip drives and 5.7 GB Orb drives – but they’ll stumble around the fringes of consumer acceptance before a quiet death off stage. Many of the same forces that are killing BD – downloading, upconverting, cost – are closing in on optical media in general.
DVDs will be around for years – even as CDs still are – but the focus is shifting to online storage and local disks. The industry still hasn’t cracked the code on massive home disk storage, but that day is coming.
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. Who needs the hassle to burn disks?
The one remaining piece is for hard drive vendors to get serious about building archive-quality hard disks. I love their technology, but they aren’t the most forward looking group.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. Anyone interested in buying a vintage USB Zip drive?
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).
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
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.
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?
“””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.
Robin…re:
“Anyone interested in buying a vintage USB Zip drive?”
Will you take my Parallel Printer port Zip drive in trade?
KDM
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.
very interesting. i was talking to a friend a couple of months ago about this when i picked up a 16 GB flash drive and there was no danger of surface damage and due that it could just over what 3 dvd’s could.
Also, with card based data, there’s no moving parts to break down.
I owned a sony PSP and very shortly i realized an optical drive was a horrible idea for a portable gaming device which is often moved around.
I hope this is true as there is an obvious build quality difference between a pre recorded cd and store bought cd-rs