With more and more emphasis on remote storage rather than physical, present storage mediums, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar phasing out occurred among similar technologies.
Finally! I had about 100 gigs to restore from another backup company. They sent me a stack of DVDs. Now I have to feed them all to my computer, one at a time.
While I think this is a good move for backup restoration, I think it's a little hasty to call DVDs dead. Redbox doesn't seem to mind raking in the cash on a "dead" media format.
I for one find it exasperating how much time DVDs (and CDs) spend spinning up and generally clicking about whilst for some reason simultaneously freezing the rest of the computer. I bet most HN readers know the reason, but, come on, we shouldn't have to be inconvenienced like this :-)
I haven't found an OS yet that reliably writes to DVDs. If I write a bunch of pictures to a DVD, I need to check afterwards that they're all present and correct. This can't just be down to my level of competence. It's a scandal.
Sometimes they spin at high revs so there's a virtual hair dryer in the background while I watch my videos. Or they go slooww and cannot be coaxed to copy my files in less than 103 minutes.
And they scratch quite easily too!
I wish we had something like those elegant crystals that Superman drops into slots to access the Kryptonian archive. Some kind of optical flash linkage ought to do the trick.
Nice of them to tell us what some of us have known for sometime... I haven't used a DVD in... at least 4 years except for installing Office because it was $10 on optical media from my University.
This feels more like an ad than anything else. It went: fact + backblaze pitch + fact + more backblaze pitch, and then it was over.
I hadn't used DVDs in years either, but when I did need my DVD drive yesterday (I wanted to try out Arch Linux) I found out it's malfunctioning :/ I can burn the disc with it, but for some reason it refuses to read anything.
To top it off, for some reason inserting my USB stick crashes the bootloader. rEFIt works perfectly fine until I put in the drive, then everything freezes.
Yeah, saying that and also, you know, providing very insightful statistics related to DVD use and some historical data on the matter. The part of the article you somehow missed.
It will be great once USB Flash Drives become as cheap as DVDs. For one thing the memory of the flash drive will continue to increase while maintaining the same form factor. And for another they don' damage as easily as a DVD.
Tangentially related: I really wish you could buy a pack of cheap flash drives the way you buy a pack of DVDs. At any given time, all the technology/office stores around carry a range of flash drives from $9.99 to $99.99. The capacity you get for a dollar goes up over time, but they never offer a drive for less than $10 (except the occasional advertised sale) or a package of multiple small drives for less than $10.
Read-write media will never be as cheap as write-once-read-many media. Perhaps DVD's are on the way out, but their replacement will not come in the form of traditional USB flash drives.
For example, Blu-ray discs are about $0.03 per GB, where a USB flash drive is approximately $1.00 per GB. Using flash memory for WORM style storage (like backups) is just silly.
The cost differential only really makes a difference if you are backing up a lot of data - and if that's the case, you are likely backing up to a Drobo or something like that, and mirroring to BackBlaze for your offsite.
Not saying _nobody_ backs up to Blu-Ray, but I'm guessing they are in the 1% of the population these days.
What I'd really like, is for someone to come up with a practical form of Archival Media. Something that you could put on your shelf, and _know_ it would still be readable, 10,20,30,40 years from now.
Silly? One USB drive can hold several backups, each new backup rewrites the oldest one.
On the other hand, you need 30 DVDs/month (assuming daily backups, and a backup takes ~1 dvd), time to write them, and a space to store them. Also, it is way less reliable.
That scheme would be far less reliable. For one, if you corrupt a file and don't notice right away, you lose it forever (which sort of defeats the purpose of backups, doesn't it?).
Also, you wouldn't actually do a full backup every day. You would perform data journaling with periodic snapshots. For example, with daily backups with a change rate of 5%, and monthly snapshots, you need only 2.5x your data size per month ignoring the minimal transaction overhead.
Never, ever, ever say "never" when it comes to tech. In 10-20 years they'll be handing out 8 GB USB drives in gumball machines for 5 cents each, and 16 TB flash drives will be $15 on amazon.
I'm not the one saying never. Why do you anticipate progress with flash storage but not with optical storage?
If we have the optical technology to render a certain number of floating gate transistors in a certain area, we also have the optical technology to render 10-100x as many bits of raw data in that same area.
Optical technology has different limits than solid state technology.
The "blu[e]" in blu-ray is a reference to the shorter wavelength of read lasers (relative to CDs/DVDs) necessary to cram more data on a disc. Trying to cram 100x as much data onto a single optical disc layer would require use of a laser with 1/10th the wavelength that blu-ray uses today, which would incur all sorts of additional costs and complexities. Granted, it might be possible to use other techniques (deep layering, holographic storage, etc.) to side-step such problems, but who knows what the limits are? It's telling that there isn't much research into next gen. optical storage compared to other storage forms.
Additionally, increasingly people are embracing form-factors for computers that do not accommodate optical drives (smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks), which helps drive R&D money into the forms of storage that are more popular.
My point is that one cannot firmly say, a priori, that one format will "never" be cheaper, larger, more popular, etc. than another. Technological progress is rapid in storage.
Why do you anticipate progress with flash storage but not with optical storage?
Because optical storage as a technology (R&D) has died, with optical drives starting to be removed from laptops and soon-ish desktop PCs in favor of flash, and mainly internet downloads/uploads. Bluerays are a dead end -- movie distribution will be (is) on the cloud. Ditto for music. Ditto for data.
Even HDs are on the way out, to be replaced by SSDs in the coming 5-7 years.
Watch how fast people start hitting Comcast's 250GB data cap in 2012 and on... especially after people start trusting online backup providers, Amazon Cloud Drive, etc with their files. That 250GB cap includes download and upload -- two months over the limit and you are terminated for 1 year, even if Comcast is the only ISP servicing your region.
Watch one HD Netflix movie a night and you've used 105GB. Make a daily backup of a 5GB folder to a cloud service and you've now gone over your monthly cap. Goodbye internet. That's what keeps me from using online backup services. If everyone is going to start downloading 4GB DVDs instead of buying software in stores, too, something's gonna have to give.
The solution is to be the only ISP in the area, and to strong-arm start-up competitors out of business with year-long contracts that force you to pay for months you have remaining upon cancellation.
Source: (I am secretly Brian Roberts - CEO of Comcast)
34 comments
[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 95.3 ms ] threadWith more and more emphasis on remote storage rather than physical, present storage mediums, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar phasing out occurred among similar technologies.
I for one find it exasperating how much time DVDs (and CDs) spend spinning up and generally clicking about whilst for some reason simultaneously freezing the rest of the computer. I bet most HN readers know the reason, but, come on, we shouldn't have to be inconvenienced like this :-)
I haven't found an OS yet that reliably writes to DVDs. If I write a bunch of pictures to a DVD, I need to check afterwards that they're all present and correct. This can't just be down to my level of competence. It's a scandal.
Sometimes they spin at high revs so there's a virtual hair dryer in the background while I watch my videos. Or they go slooww and cannot be coaxed to copy my files in less than 103 minutes.
And they scratch quite easily too!
I wish we had something like those elegant crystals that Superman drops into slots to access the Kryptonian archive. Some kind of optical flash linkage ought to do the trick.
This feels more like an ad than anything else. It went: fact + backblaze pitch + fact + more backblaze pitch, and then it was over.
To top it off, for some reason inserting my USB stick crashes the bootloader. rEFIt works perfectly fine until I put in the drive, then everything freezes.
Can't believe something like this does not exist yet.
For example, Blu-ray discs are about $0.03 per GB, where a USB flash drive is approximately $1.00 per GB. Using flash memory for WORM style storage (like backups) is just silly.
Not saying _nobody_ backs up to Blu-Ray, but I'm guessing they are in the 1% of the population these days.
What I'd really like, is for someone to come up with a practical form of Archival Media. Something that you could put on your shelf, and _know_ it would still be readable, 10,20,30,40 years from now.
I often wonder whether these guys are for real: http://millenniata.com/
On the other hand, you need 30 DVDs/month (assuming daily backups, and a backup takes ~1 dvd), time to write them, and a space to store them. Also, it is way less reliable.
Also, you wouldn't actually do a full backup every day. You would perform data journaling with periodic snapshots. For example, with daily backups with a change rate of 5%, and monthly snapshots, you need only 2.5x your data size per month ignoring the minimal transaction overhead.
If we have the optical technology to render a certain number of floating gate transistors in a certain area, we also have the optical technology to render 10-100x as many bits of raw data in that same area.
The "blu[e]" in blu-ray is a reference to the shorter wavelength of read lasers (relative to CDs/DVDs) necessary to cram more data on a disc. Trying to cram 100x as much data onto a single optical disc layer would require use of a laser with 1/10th the wavelength that blu-ray uses today, which would incur all sorts of additional costs and complexities. Granted, it might be possible to use other techniques (deep layering, holographic storage, etc.) to side-step such problems, but who knows what the limits are? It's telling that there isn't much research into next gen. optical storage compared to other storage forms.
Additionally, increasingly people are embracing form-factors for computers that do not accommodate optical drives (smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks), which helps drive R&D money into the forms of storage that are more popular.
My point is that one cannot firmly say, a priori, that one format will "never" be cheaper, larger, more popular, etc. than another. Technological progress is rapid in storage.
Because optical storage as a technology (R&D) has died, with optical drives starting to be removed from laptops and soon-ish desktop PCs in favor of flash, and mainly internet downloads/uploads. Bluerays are a dead end -- movie distribution will be (is) on the cloud. Ditto for music. Ditto for data.
Even HDs are on the way out, to be replaced by SSDs in the coming 5-7 years.
Dvd jumped the shark right about the time I could download 4 gig in about the same time it took to read it off a crummy dvd-r.
Watch one HD Netflix movie a night and you've used 105GB. Make a daily backup of a 5GB folder to a cloud service and you've now gone over your monthly cap. Goodbye internet. That's what keeps me from using online backup services. If everyone is going to start downloading 4GB DVDs instead of buying software in stores, too, something's gonna have to give.
Source: (I am secretly Brian Roberts - CEO of Comcast)
(Don't tell anyone)