Storage: From film to optical
Jun 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Collin Lajoie
Here’s a look back at the evolution from analog tape to modern digital servers, optical and flash storage products.
The future of storage
Luff believes that optical storage is likely to be adopted in the near future, once the technology is proven and it becomes cost-effective, primarily because light “is in order of magnitude, shorter wavelength, so you can put that much more data in a same volume optically than you can with any other kind of electrical signal.” The adoption of optical may become as commonplace as fiber, for much the same reason.
Craig, on the other hand, has a healthy amount of skepticism about the medium.
“By the time the years roll by and this optical stuff ends up practical, magnetic for sure will be long past it, and I think solid state is going to catch magnetic. Then it'll be interesting to see how it goes. My guess is in 10 years, it'll all go solid state.”
Schubin essentially disregards “new” storage media and instead points to a concept of storage migration presented in a paper by Dave Cavena for Sun Microsystems. “[Cavena] said screw the technology; forget about the media. Instead, assume that you're going to constantly migrate your technology. So instead of getting the world's best hard drives, get the world's worst hard drives. Because with enough redundancy, they'll still store the data, and they're bound to last five years,” Schubin says. “And then every three years, technology is going to change, and you just buy whatever happens to be the cheap technology. The idea is that you're always storing only the data; you don't care about the storage mechanism because you're only going to be changing it.”
Collin LaJoie is an associate editor for Broadcast Engineering.
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