The Best And Worst Of Storage In The '90s.

by Mark Brownstein and Hal Glatzer

MARK: After another decade of storage news--

HAL: Wait! There's still another year to go before the decade ends. I'm a 2001 advocate.

MARK: So, you really are the "HAL" computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey." I knew it!

HAL: "That's a very nice rendering, Dave. I must say your technique has certainly improved."

MARK: We're still waiting for that kind of talking computer! Maybe we'll have one in another 2,000 years, but who's going to be around for that?

HAL: Mel Brooks, maybe.

MARK: There is a bit of a gap between "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "the 2,000-year-old man."

HAL: Sounds like a good lead-in to our "best-of" and "worst-of" rankings for the '90s.

MARK: I do think both those productions were among the "best-of" in their respective fields.

HAL: I agree, but what about storage technologies? What have you got?

MARK: Something that could be EITHER a best or a worst: It's Travan.

HAL: - Ahhh, the little tape that will not die!

MARK: Yes. It's still strong on the desktop; it's cheap and simple to use. Don't think about backing up a server with it, though; and it faces competition now from OnStream at around $10/GB.

HAL: I've got one of those split-decisions too: it's Magneto Optical. The hottest storage alternative for half of this decade, MO proved that optical disks weren't all write-once and, for a few years, MO offered the highest capacity of any rewritable disk--magnetic included. Now it's confronting what will probably be its final challenge: the DVD-recordables.

MARK: I think it still has a lot of life left. For companies where secure storage is critical and for companies with a MO legacy, I think MO will be around for a long time.

HAL: Yes, but you'll have to agree that the much higher areal density of DVD-recordables will make them more attractive, even to some of today's MO users, and especially when you toss in jukeboxes. Then, any worry about damaging a disk goes away, while the media costs continue to drop. Compare the total amount of data that can be stored in the same footprint and DVD gets much more attractive than MO.

MARK: We've been politely even-handed so far. How about some unalloyed winners and losers?

HAL: Winners? How about those Hard Disk Drives? I've had my own computer since 1980 and maybe I'm the only user in those 20 years who's never had a hard disk crash, but HDDs have become incredibly reliable nowadays.

MARK: For me, it seems like my disks crash almost on a weekly basis.

HAL: I'm sorry to hear that, but, over the past ten years, the mean-time-between-failures has skyrocketed. You practically have to drop today's HDDs off the desk and onto a cement floor before they'll crash.

MARK: Either that or just hand one to me, but I agree with you about HDDs in general. They're the success story of which every storage developer dreams. I do have some concerns because capacities are increasing faster than access times and I wonder how much data ought to hang out on a single spindle.

HAL: We debated that issue a few months ago. Let's move on.

MARK: Okay. Another success story. Three letters: D.L.T.

HAL: Absolutely. Good capacity at a fair price and DLT made people re-consider tape, just when tape seemed to be passe. It overcame the traditional objection that tape doesn't last.

MARK: Let's give a nod to the third-party library-makers who helped to put DLT into departments and mid-size businesses and made it a de facto standard if ever there was one.

HAL: I have to wonder if DLT will keep its lead in the next decade with so many competing formats being introduced.

MARK: We've discussed that issue several times too. Got any nominees for ignominy?

HAL: Well, certainly there are products whose only fault is that the hands of time brushed past their cheeks and moved on. Like 3.5-inch MO or the MD minidisk, or the 20MB Floptical. All of them were technological breakthroughs--and none of them was able to define or stimulate a mass market.

MARK: Then, there are the products that simply ran out of gas. I'm thinking of the SyQuest lines, especially their early 5.25-inch models that stole the whole market away from Iomega's 8-inch Bernoulli Boxes. I've got a 44MB Bernoulli Box in my storage shed. Do you want it? Cover my shipping costs and this classic of leading edge technology is all yours.

HAL: How about the vaporware that's been touted over the past few years? Has anybody actually seen a TeraStor drive or a Quinta drive? Weren't we supposed to be dazzled by "near-field" and "far-field" recording by now?

MARK: Has anybody seen the new drive that Finis Conner was promoting? Seagate, Western Digital, Quantum, IBM, and Fujitsu have all come out with bigger, cheaper drives, effectively closing his market window.

HAL: Let's come back to the winners' circle. I'd like to propose, as "Storage Device of the Decade," the recordable Compact Disc. Even after ten years, 650MB is a heck of a lot of data for most applications to store--and that's on a single piece of removable media that now costs users less than a dollar.

MARK: A winner for sure! Toss in rewritability, since five years ago, plus jukeboxes, network-attachments, and packet-writing, and you've got the best single storage alternative so far developed. As a distribution medium, the CD-ROM helped create the modern software industry. In 1990, it would have cost $120 or more to distribute on floppy disks what could be put onto a CD-ROM that--even then--costs only about $2 to make and replicated CD-ROMs today cost far less than a dollar. Amazing.

HAL: I'm sure that DVD will continue the trend of bringing inexpensive optical disk storage into the next decade. The price of DVD-video players has come down to $199; and DVD-ROM drives are even cheaper. By year's end, I estimate you'll be able to buy an entry-level DVD-RAM recording drive between $200-300.

MARK: My candidate for another best-of-the-decade has been around for more than a decade, but Moore's Law is finally catching up and I predict it will have a disproportionally large influence over the next few years. It's flash memory: semiconductor arrays that are set up to mimic other media. Flash is non-volatile--record it once and it holds the data until you intentionally erase and overwrite it. It's been big for reconfiguring your computer's BIOS and reprogramming hard drives, video cards, and other devices with embedded BIOS chips, but now it's making its way into storage. You've got solid-state versions of hard-disk drives now, as the front ends to big tape libraries for database retrieval, and you've got non-volatile, matchbook-size (or even smaller) digital "film" for cameras that can store hundreds of photos. The inherent capacities of the chips will only get larger and with their near instantaneous access times--

HAL: At a price! Don't forget: they're still too expensive to actually replace the things that they mimic.

MARK: No question about that, but I can't think of any application that won't benefit from flash memory within a couple of years. There is still some work to be done on improving the writing speeds and dropping power consumption, but I'm confident these challenges will be met. One day, I think we'll all probably be carrying a small chip with our complete medical history on a keychain or neckchain, or maybe in our wristwatch, all courtesy of flash.

HAL: - Happy New Year!

MARK: Go ahead--make my Millennium.

HAL: Seriously, folks, if you have any other candidates for "best of the decade," drop me a line at [e-mail].

MARK: If you've got some ideas of "worst of the decade," (not "wurst of the decade"--I don't want sausage jokes), let me know at [e-mail].