One thing that doesn't draw enough comment in the excitement over the iPod (right, from the Hatena Diary in Japan) (and its growing list of competitors) is what this says about the underlying technology.
The iPod is a triumph for the hard disk over optical storage.
When DVDs first came out in the late 1990s they were able to offer about 5 Gigabytes of permanent storage on a disk that could sell for $20, even including the cost of the content. At that time it was a big deal to have a 5 Gigabyte hard drive, and you paid through the nose for it.
Today drive storage prices are down to $1 per Gigabyte. And you can get this storage in any form factor you want. There are even hard drives in some mobile phones.
Not only has the price come down, but today's drives are sturdier than ever. Those dancers on the iPod commercials? Their music isn't skipping, as it might if they were holding CD players in their hands. (That's a subliminal point made in the marketing.) Remember tape back-up? Raise your hands if you still have it, or think you still need it.
The optical disk, meanwhile, has become a floppy. Sure you can buy a blank disk for as little as 60 cents, in quantity. (Fry's has a special on of 50 for $30, with rebate.) But what do you get for that? A few hours of a movie, maybe a dozen albums. And it's still not as sturdy or portable as a hard drive device.
The reason hard drives have become cool while optics drool has something to do with Moore's Law, but also the process by which these two technologies march forward.
You can introduce a new hard disk (like this one, shown on the Drivelabs site) to hardware makers at any time. You don't have to meet a pre-existing standard. So long as you offer software that lets the electronics of your device read and write to the disk, who cares how it's formatted.
Optical disks, however, have to go through a standards process to become useful. (Again, like floppies.) You can't build a mass media market on a host of different standards. (You don't see people buying movies on memory cards.) You have to get together, agree on the next encoding standard, get all your ducks in a row, and then expect that the result will be stable for years. Committees don't move that fast.
There are BluRay proposals out right now that will allow 47 Gigabytes of storage. But before that reaches the market you not only have to get agreement on the media, but on its formatting, and (thanks to the copyright industries) on a host of other issues.
Or you can go to Fry's and buy a new 160 Gigabyte disk for $150. Or a 10 Gigabyte iPod for $200.
Opticals are floppies not just because hard drive technology is following Moore faster than optics. Opticals are floppies because committees are a government process, while hard drives are an entrepreneurial process, and the latter is always going to be quicker to market.
I agree. The hard drive has a bright future. Yes you have those in other industries crowing about Flash memory or the next big thing in Optical but the fact remains that hard drives have exceeded just about every other storage technology in growth and speed. However the progenitors of competing products want to confuse the general public. For instance in video tape still rules the roost for camcorders although it will soon be phased out. For what? Well if you listen to Panasonic they will tell you that the future is with their P2 Flash memory that currently sells for $750 for 4GB a cool $187.5 per gigabyte or is that gigaBITE. Oh yeah and you'll need up to 6 cards for any decent record time.
Sony on the other had will be flogging it's Blue Laser Optical tech. Once you've shelled out beaucoup dollars for the optical mechanism you will likely pay $45 for the 23GB discs for a $1.95 per gigabyte cost.
Neither company is interested in taking the path of least resistence. The path of common sense which is using hard drives. Flash memory is far too expensive and offers barely enough speed. Optical has cheap media costs but the mechanisms are expensive. With hard drives you simply have your drive interface(SCSI or SATA)and very little else is really needed. Toshiba has a 1.8" 60GB drive coming soon. Even with the more expensive cost per GB that the mini drives offer they still add up to a more robust system for many things. Optical is great for long term storage but when I need speed and short term storage I'd prefer hard drives. I'm hoping that we seem more people with that entrepreneurial spirit make the right moves. Panasonic and Sony are into furthering their own technologies but I'd rather spend my money on something that's working to make "my" job easier.
Permalink to CommentMaybe I'm missing implied subtlety here, but the issue to me is not so much about standards vs. propritary, but about where the standards are deployed. With hard drives, they are deployed at the ATA/IDE interface (which, BTW, has been a recurring hurdle in their advance) or, in the case of portable drives like the iPod, USB or FireWire. With floppies, CDs, and DVDs, "the interface was the device" or "the device was the interface" (to butcher the Sun slogan).
Interfaces have to be negotiated. Negotiation is expensive. Deploy standard interfaces at inexpensive and stable points. That's the lesson I see.
Permalink to CommentAddress spaces advance by powers of powers of 2.
2^2^2 = 4 bits = 16 locations
2^2^3 = 8 bits = 256 locations
2^2^4 = 16 bits = 16K locations
2^2^5 = 32 bits = 4 Gig locations
2^2^6 = 64 bits = 16 Exa locations
2^2^7 = 128 bits = 256 ExaExa locations
This is in striking distinction to physical disks, which advance by factors of ten or less. The IP protocol is jumping from the 5th kind of address space to the 7th, skipping the 6th.
The USB spec provides for 4 Gig blocks, each of up to 4 Gbytes. These can be interpreted as a 64-bit address (6th kind) and reassigned internally as expedient, much as was done with the Logical Block Address scheme back in the early 1990's.
(USB Mass Storage Class – UFI Command Specification Revision 1.0, December 14, 1998)
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