Optical Storage At The Turn Of The Century.

Magnetic tape systems surged ahead of optical disc systems during the past ten years; but optical has a fresh chance to recover its leadership in the storage hierarchy--even though, where cost is the chief concern, tape has so far won out.

Optical systems are undergoing a format proliferation--a healthy sign. It shows that R&D is well funded and that manufacturers are optimistic that new products can win some market share.

True, 12-inch WORM is in a holding action with only Plasmon LMS left to retain or grow the customer base and everybody has been losing market share to tape-based systems, especially DLT From here on out, though, optical disk systems will rise again: the winners will be CD at the low end and DVD) at the high end.

With the arrival of MP3 and other high-compression music formats, CD-audio recording has suddenly become a passion among young people. The drives and media that are sold as stereo components are overpriced; but most users now realize that computer-based CD-R works just as well and cost much less. I feel safe in predicting that hundreds of "amateur" and "semi-professional" record producers will soon make themselves known in the music business.

The CD jukebox, once a luxury is appearing at the deskside now and advances in firmware enable features previously available only with MO such as packet writing, data caching, and simultaneous reads and writes from multiple drives. If the price of pre-formatted CD-RW media ever comes down to match that of blank CD-R media, believe me no one will buy Zip any more.

As for commercial data storage, it must be admitted that MO is up against a wall. There cannot and will not be another doubling of the present 2.6GB/side capacity; the best guess is about four-point-something, but write-once DVD-R is already at 4.7GB and rewritable DVD-RAM is due to ship with 4.7GB capacity this year. The trend is clearly away from magneto-optic technology and toward purely optical phase-change technology, on which all DVD recording schemes are based.

Unless Pioneer decides to make a commodity item out of its hideously overpriced write-once system, DVD-R will remain a niche product. It's DVD-RAM that has the upside potential. DVD-RAM has been on the market for almost two years and it continues to work as specified. Sure, it's slower than an HDD or a Jaz drive, but it's faster than CD-RW and Zip and (12-inch WORM excepted). It stores far more data than any other removable disk media. CD and DVD media and drives share the same form-factors, so almost every CD jukebox maker now offers a line of DVD jukeboxes--and a few of them aren't even charging a premium for what is, after all, an upgrade!

Fortunately, a threatened DVD standards war has been averted. Cool heads have apparently prevailed at Hewlett-Packard and Ricoh and, I assume, at Sony and Philips too. They have officially delayed--read "killed"--release of their 3GB DVD+RW system in favor of making the next generation hold 4.7GB and making that next generation compatible, somehow, with read-only DVD-ROM and DVD-Video drives (as DVD-RAM is not).

They have the resources to do that and DVD+RW would be highly competitive against DVD-RAM if they were to accomplish that in 2000. Indeed, DVD+RW would take over the market if its 4.7GB disks could be read by today's drives, since ultra-low prices this past Christmastime put DVD-Video players into a lot of homes.

Are there any technologies on the horizon that could change this picture? Not in the short term. In MO, blue laser diodes would drastically reduce recording spot sizes and, thereby, increase areal densities; but nobody has yet produced a commercially viable blue diode--one that's small enough or cheap enough, or lasts long enough to be practical.

Where are Quinta and TeraStor? Shouldn't they have produced at least some entry-level product by now? Their so-called "near field" and "far field" technologies may work in the lab (though I haven't seen them work there, either), but, in the storage business, if you can't mass-produce something, it's off the radar screen. I think their windows-of-opportunity have already closed.

So 2000 will be an "optical" year, meaning a year in which current optical technology moves ahead in the market. We'll see greater interest than ever in CD-recordables and deeper penetration for DVD-RAM.