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Ok, firstly, I will introduce a new technology, holographic storage.
Do any of you buy New Scientist magazine? This week's issue had a very interesting article regarding Holographic DVD's. It's quite a good read. The basic points were that Holographic DVD's are almost certainly the successor to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, they are being developed by 2 rival firms (one of which is being backed by Sony), and they can hold up to 1.2 Terabytes of data (which is about 300 DVD's worth of data).
Here is an old(ish) article from the New Scientist website that I was able to find which will tell you more about the technology behind Holographic DVD's.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8370
New Scientist wrote:
The discs, at 13 centimetres across, are a little wider than conventional DVDs, and slightly thicker. Normal DVDs record data by measuring microscopic ridges on the surface of a spinning disc. Two competing successors to the DVD format – Blu-ray and HD-DVD – use the same technique but exploit shorter wavelengths of light to cram more information onto a surface.
Holographic memory, by contrast, stores information in a light-sensitive crystal material using the interference of laser light. The process involves splitting a single light beam into two and then passing one through a semi-transparent material. This is a grid that acts like a filter, changing different parts of the beam to encode bits of information.
Some guy on some forum wrote:
The upshot of this? Well, I personally think that this could well be whats inside the next XBox or/and Sony Playstation 4. As one format war will come to an end, so another one will begin. At present, Holographic DVD's will only be used by banks, governments, medical companies and IT firms who need to back up tons of data every single day at a very high speed but eventually, in a couple of years at most, the costs will come down and the aim is to get it into the homes of most consumers.
The first generation of InPhase drives will have a capacity of 300Gb on a single disk.
I strong believe optical storage is going out like magnetic FDD did, do here comes solid state flash storage with 8GB in a credit card and now 2TB solid state by yellow machine, virtually indestructible!
Optical storage, its a degradable, non-archival, breakable, scratchable, mistakeable-for-a-frisbee, easily destroyed storage medium... I mean, 50GB of data you can snap in half?
So, yes, I think the future is solid state or Flash storage; think how much you can store on a tiny SD or CF card, with no moving parts, almost impossible to destroy, resistant to shack and even water, RAID Drives can store GB's of data, and it cant be snapped.
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The demise of Floppy Drives, and Magnetic storage is avident as the old ATA/IDE Drives are pushed off the market by falling prices of flash memory; although There's a confusing picture in many consumer products like phones, cameras and music players in which one day it seems that the storage function is done by flash and next day another company announces they're doing the same thing with miniature hard disks. This change wont happen really quickly, as the HDD is still alot cheaper than the flash memory.
Solid State vs HDD Price Graph:
And this Capacity vs Storage graph shows why in the smaller storage, flash is used... but expect to see this change soon!
In the shorter term, Flash will be the leading choice in portable applications where a limited number of small files are used because it will offer the lowest overall system cost, Other limited-capacity applications will also gravitate towards flash; In applications where file size or the total number of files to be stored is of more concern than total system cost, HDDs will prevail I think for the near future.
Everything will change over time, as declining prices cause flash to replace HDD in portable applications where storage requirements reach some natural limit.
It is not the first time the death-knell for the floppy has been sounded. The first nail in the coffin came in 1998, when the iMac was revealed without a floppy disk drive.
Then in 2003, Dell banished disk drives from its higher spec machines.
So with the Floppy Disc gone, we can see the demise of magnetic storage clearly.
This here is a very interesting post on the Electronic Engineers Voice.
http://www.edn.com/blog/400000040/post/1570002757.html
Quote:
Flash memory will be cheaper per meg than hard disk storage in just 11 years
according to this survey; and I suspect the trend will change faster than this, and it could be 3-5 years.
I can also see CDs going a same way vs Flash memory!
Harddrives vs Optical Storage:
Quote:
Bigger cheaper hard drives gives HDNet the ability to use that additional storage to hold our content in uncompressed quality and increase the picture quality that you can see on your TV. A bunch. We can take advantage of new cameras to capture at better and better qualities, and of new compression schemes that approach future camera capabilities, only because we have ever expanding storage. That's something DVDs will never have. So by delivering content on Hard Drives rather than DVDs, we will be able to continue to increase the picture quality for years to come.
The other cool part is that the video playback devices that will be in your home over the next couple years will have the ability to connect via USB or Firewire to these drives. PVRs, Set top Boxes, Media Center PCs,even DVDs designed to play today's DVDs and whatever future DVD standard is settled on, all will have the ability to connect to Hard Drives in some shape or fashion, or people wont buy them. There is going to be a big, big war to host your content in your house. Whoever does it the best, provides the most flexibility, and expandability at the best price, will win.
Next on my reasons to love this approach to distribution is that it basically kills off the "Piracy is going to kill us" threats from the big movie companies. Hard Drive storage is expanding far more quickly than upload or download speeds to our homes. The ability to use that hard drive storage to increase the quality and file size of a movie, makes it practically impossible to distribute it over the net. I have a question I always ask at speeches, and have asked for the last several years. I ask if anyone in the room has ever downloaded or uploaded a movie or TV show in HD quality to or from a P2P network. No one has ever raised their hand.
Vista still pays homage to it by continuing to use a floppy disk as the icon for saving a document in Microsoft Word 2007. - I do hope this never changes. Won't it just be quite cool in, say, 40 years' time, when Microsoft Word 2047 still has that familiar icon, and we have to explain to our grandchildren about the 3-and-a-half inch disk. They'll be the next generation's phonograph.
While hard drive advances are impressive, losing 1TB of data is not likely to be much fun in the future. That is why devices built around a technology known by the fearsome name of Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) are becoming more popular. One such is Seagate's 1.5TB device that is actually made up of two 750GB drives.
A continuous backup is created by the same data being written to both drives simultaneously. It might well save your life. Well, your digital one.
Some storage firms, such as SanDisk, are doing away with the mechanical hard drive completely and are opting for an all flash solution. Its flash drive is due out in Spring.
Using flash memory has many advantages. A modified laptop using only flash memory can start up faster than an ordinary one; is less of a drain on battery power and is far less likely to suffer data loss when dropped.
However, the biggest it can currently get is 32GB which says something about its target market.
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They'll be the next generation's phonograph.