Optical storage: here today, gone tomorrow
Technology doesn’t last forever, and sooner or later something better will come along and replace the old standards. This is why you don’t see 3.5 inch Floppy disks, tape drives or vinyl records anymore, and why one day your children will marvel at things like CDs and Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitors.
Optical storage is past its sell-by-date
The Compact Disc (CD) has been around for almost 30 years, while Digital Versatile Discs (DVD) first appeared around 16 years ago. We grew up listening to music, watching movies and installing games on CDs and DVDs, but if you think about it, how often does this still happen? There are a few reasons why current optical media won’t be around for much longer.
Convenience and cost: Games, movies and music are now available for streaming and downloading online, and are often far cheaper than the same data on optical media. In addition, they’re easier to access and the risk of losing your data is lessened greatly.
Storage capacity: The typical CD can hold 700MB of data, while the average DVD holds between 4.7GB and 8.5GB. By today’s standards, that just isn’t enough. High definition movies require far more space than the 8.5GB max on offer with DVD’s, and only 80 minutes of uncompressed audio will fit onto a CD. With high definition audio and display technology becoming more affordable recently, why would you want to deal with the standard definition content anymore?
Future technology tries to bolster optical media
Researchers haven’t abandoned the optical storage medium just yet. Blu-ray and holographic disk storage are here to extend the lifetime of the optical medium, but is it too little too late?
While not a technology of the future, Blu-ray discs are the current stalwarts of the market. With capacity ranging up to 50GB per disk, they are the preferred medium for shipping high definition content such as movies and games. However, costs of the discs and Blu-ray compatible media players have slowed consumer adoption of this technology, and users are still left with an inconvenient storage medium, prone to loss or damage.
Holographic storage technology, still in development, is the optical media technology of the future. With a capacity of 500GB and the size of a standard DVD disc, holographic discs will provide enough storage for future high definition standards. However, along with this new medium comes a high price tag and the need for new media players, suffering from the same issues that have plagued Blu-ray media to date.
Current and future technologies such as Blu-ray discs and holographic storage are here to ensure the optical storage format lives on for a few more years. At the rate that technologies such as cloud storage, flash storage and wireless streaming are developing, it’s just a matter of time before you tell your kids about old fashioned DVDs the way grandpa used to go on about the gramophone.
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