New Horizons in Storage

Introduction
It's amazing how quickly the computer market moves forward. as recently as 1999, Apple was touting its "Pentium Crushing" CPU performance in TV ads that boasted that its fastest microprocessor (at that time, and, until Jan. 2001, a 500 MHz G4) was a "supercomputer." A scant year later, 1 GHz processors cost as little as $225 US. AMD is selling Athlon processors rated at speeds up to 1.3 GHz and Intel is shipping Pentium 4 models running at speeds up to 1.7 GHz.

Equally rapid have been the advances in storage technologies. DVD first appeared on the scene in 1997, Now, Constellation 3D says it has solved the problems of signal degradation associated with current reflective optical disc technologies of CD and DVD. It says that, utilizing its new multi-layer, fluorescent cards/discs (FMD/C) technology, media containing up to a hundred layers are currently feasible, thereby increasing the potential capacity of a single card or disk to hundreds of Gigabytes. Use of blue lasers would increase the capacities to over 1 Terabyte.

Clearly, massive capacities in removable media are not far off, nor are they particularly expensive to achieve when working with hard drives or tape backup systems.

Here's an approximate price comparison of how much a Terabyte of storage costs in various media:

• CD-RW (based on the 50-pack cost of US$10 at CompUSA, in Sept. 2000): $300 (not including drives, assuming Direct CD 3.0 data compression is enabled.)
• Hard Drives (based on the TransIntl.com price of Maxtor 80GB FireWire units at US$379, in Nov. 2000): $4737, assuming no data compression is employed.
• The per megabyte cost of storage on DAT drives typically runs around 1 to 5 tenths of a cent. Thus, 1 TB=$1000 to $5000.

Performance gains, too, have been dramatic. The Draft Specification 1.0 of Serial ATA was officially released in late Nov. 2000. See our feature entitled SCSI, IDE, FireWire and USB (etc.) for details on this and competing technologies or visit the Serial ATA Working Group website for more information.

For Additional Reading:

• Timeline for 2000 and 2001.
• News.com: Can disk drives keep up with faster PCs?
• Macspeedzone.com ProductWatch: Successor to Imation SuperDrive stores 32MB on a standard floppy.