Re Optical Storage
Editor:-
when I started STORAGEsearch.com in
1998 there was a lot of industry excitement about the promise of optical
storage.
Marketers in optical storage companies set the hype volume at
a high level - which was necessary in those days for anyone to be heard above
the din of the dotcom boom.
It was not uncommon to read claims like:-
- "Our optical disks will offer more capacity than hard drives."
and / or
- "Our new optical storage will be faster than hard disks." and /
or
- "Optical storage will replace
tape and
disks as the primary backup
medium."
Although hundreds of millions of dollars got poured into
such ventures (a small dribble compared to the the multi-billion dollar
VC storage stream)
nothing very significant ever came out the other end. And certainly nothing
approaching the aspirations of the industry.
Instead the optical
storage industry has settled into a comfortable sort of middle age couch potato
early retirement. Instead of offering revolutionary products - they're mostly
content churning out bits of shiny plastic for delivering music or movies.
There are still some comnpanies flogging the dead horse of optical
backup and archiving. But for most users - the proposition of backing up a
single hard disk onto 10 or more optical ones - doesn't sound like a better way
to do things.
Every couple of years - the rallying cries from the old
pretenders (or new ones) of optical storage are heard again. But after a few
flurries and flag waving press releases - they go quiet and nothing more is
heard.
If anything does happen to change that - I'll let you know. |
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HD DVD Takes Early
Retirement
Editor:-
February 18, 2008 - industry rumors speculate that Toshiba may pull the
plug on its HD DVD standard conceding to Blu-ray.
Blu Ray
marketers will be rejoicing - but this media war is a side issue.
4
years ago in an article called
Do CDs and DVDs Have a Long
Term Future? I warned that the 20 year long run of removable consumer
optical media which started with the CD - would come to an early end.
In a follow up article (published Jan 2007)
Don't be Taken in by
Blu Ray vs DVD Sophistry I predicted that neither Blu Ray nor HD DVD would
have a long market life - because internet downloads would replace physical
disks as the primary form of non broadcast movie distribution.
Digistore Passes 100,000 CD Libraries
Milestone
Wilmington,
Del - July 9, 2007 -Digistore Solutions today announced that it has
reached a major milestone with the shipment of its 100,000th unit in its
Centurion line of CD storage devices since the company's launch at the end of
2003.
The company's Centurion CD provides users with a 100-disc capacity
per unit. By stacking multiple CCD units, companies can manage as many as
127,000 discs from a single-user interface, enabling a safe and convenient
method of data storage and retrieval.
...Digistore
profile, optical
libraries
Call/Recall Aims Death Ray at UDO /
Blu-ray Optical Archiving
SAN DIEGO - June 27, 2007 - Call/Recall
Inc. today announced availability of licensing for its patented optical
storage technology that can provide 40x the capacity of Blu-ray and over
200x the capacity of DVD technology.
Call/Recall's
innovative optical storage technology utilizes a 2-photon recording process to
record bits in a 3 dimensional volume in a disk. Multiple layers of information
can be stored with less than a 10-micron layer of separation, effectively
allowing the equivalent of 250 conventional DVD layers to be put onto one DVD.
Call/Recall's technology uses affordable, commercially available,
off-the-shelf components. This approach allows optical hardware manufacturers to
extend the roadmap of their existing technologies, such as DVD and Blu-ray while
maintaining backward compatibility with their installed base.
...Call/Recall
profile |
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| Nibble:- Don't be Taken in by Blu Ray vs DVD Sophistry |
News stories from vendors are a valuable source of market information -
but they can sometimes create a misleading expectation of what could happen
when they talk about predicting technology trends.
Vendors
understandably talk up their market's growth prospects by citing optimistic
analyst predictions.
The reason is that most buyers are cautious and don't want to be the first to
get burned by the bugs in a new technology. By suggesting that a new market will
be very big, or will grow very fast, or has already reached a critical mass -
vendors hope that buyers will be more confident and move faster along the new
technology adoption curve.
I can tell you from decades of tracking
such technology predictions that they often turn out to be as inaccurate as
getting an opinion from your pet dog or cat. But until markets become
established so that it's possible to track revenue or other historic data -
comparing crystal ball images is as good as it gets - and makes for interesting
editorial too.
Take the case of what's happening now in the consumer
optical storage market.
A simple search on
Google
shows that many editors and analysts have bought into the market model currently
being pushed by manufacturers who are recycling the "Betamax versus VHS"
legend as an analog for the "High Definition DVD versus Blu Ray"
market.
It's a seductive argument (for both sides) because it leads you
down a tunnel in which you are left thinking that the future of buying and
storing big globs of portable entertainment has to be one or the other. But
that's not necessarily so.
Instead of the Betamax / VHS case study so
beloved by commentators I'd like to call to your attention another old (and
mostly forgotten) but more recent example - which is much closer to home - the
battle of the Super Floppies.
What seemed at stake in the mid 1990s
was:- what format would replace the 3.5" floppy drive? - an appendage
which once adorned hundreds of millions of PCs.
Competing for
attention were several incompatible formats by
Iomega, Samsung
and Sony. As we now know none of these royal claimants took
possession of the floppy throne. Instead a republic was declared.
Most
people found out they could exchange information much more conveniently using
email instead of thin plastic wallets. And software publishers found that CDs
were a more appropriate form of software distribution rather than boxed sets of
floppies. The floppy drive slot was replaced by a CD and then later DVD drive -
and not by a super floppy drive.
Fast forward to today's digital
entertainment storage and distribution market (which is the setting for the Blu
Ray vs HD DVD debates.
The simplest way to sell content is via the
internet.
The simplest way to store hundreds of movies on a single
storage device is on a single big
hard disk.
I
wrote an
article saying something
similar back in 2004 - and neither the appearance of holographic storage nor UDO
etc has changed my view.
True - a lot of boxes will get sold with slots
which are compatible with shiny looking coated plastic disks in the next few
years - but there's a significant probability that the Super Optical market
could soon go the way of the Super Floppies - and that neither Blu Ray nor HD
DVD have a long future.
See also:- previous article:-
the Future of
High Speed Disk Drives for Servers | |
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Megabyte
knew you could use light for
communications, but he wasn't quite sure
how it worked for storage... | |
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Bare Media
Exposed - Looking at the Contenders for Optical Media Archiving - article by
Plasmon
Optical archiving has become a legally mandated
storage technology in many markets. There are a lot of new optical media
technologies and packaging formats to choose from. But which ones will stand the
test of time in terms of data reliability and cost of ownership? Plasmon,
founded in 1987, has nearly 2 decades of experience as a systems and media
supplier in the optical archiving industry. This article by Steve Tongish,
Plasmon's Director of Marketing EMEA, looks at the critical factors for the
new products now available and those emerging so you can assess which will work
best for you. ...
read the article,
...Plasmon profile,
Optical Libraries | |
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| Do
CDs and DVDs Have a Long Term Future as Digital Storage? - article |
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"CDs have already been around for 20 years - so
that may seem like forever and you may think that DVDs too will still be around
just as long. But my own view is that these are merely short term stepping
stones to something else in the same way that scrolls and loose collections of
paper were a transient phase which gave way to the bound book." ...read the article | |
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