CD-R and CD-RW are already being widely used for desktop storage, and DVD-R and DVD-RAM are now becoming available for those requiring higher capacities. Does this mean that more expensive magneto-optical (MO) storage solutions are at the end of their life cycle? Sony's latest 9.1GB MO drive and its upcoming Ultra Density Optical (UDO) technology may point to a second youth for MO storage.
Recordable CDs have dropped dramatically in price and it has become feasible to regard them as throwaway. CD-RWs allow overwriting and reuse, but they cost more and are less stable than their CD-R counterparts, which can only record once.
Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of CDs is their limited storage space of about 650MB. DVDs can hold 4.7GB, but analysts such as Giga Information Group believe that recordable DVD has three critical problems: lack of standards, high price and poor marketing. Last year, Giga analyst Rob Enderle said that the lack of standards was crippling DVD-R. Six months later, Enderle repeated his view and stated that DVD-RAM appeared to be best for image archiving. However, the Cahners In-Stat Group, a digital communications research company, considers DVD media as suitable only for consumer use.
Nevertheless CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R and DVD-RAM are all being used by companies such as Plasmon and Hewlett-Packard to manufacture 'jukeboxes':Â devices that contain many disks and can automatically select the required one for reading.
Plasmon offers CD and DVD libraries with capacities of up to 4.1TB, which is slightly less than its largest MO library at 4.6TB. But DVD and CD technologies are less rugged than MO, whose physical media is less likely to degrade, and which benefits from the protection of being in a cartridge. Plasmon said MO drives can withstand 750,000 disk insertions and have a mean time between failure of at least 100,000 hours of continuous use.
According to Plasmon, MO and write once, read many (Worm), a variation of MO, are the best technologies for data-intensive applications requiring near-line access speeds.
According to analysts, storage will be increasingly used for document management and e-business, where high capacity is critical. Sony and its equipment vendor partners, Hewlett-Packard and Plasmon, believe Sony's next-generation UDO technology will answer these needs. Initially available in 40GB disk configurations, UDO is expected to grow quickly to a capacity of at least 120GB per disk.
UDO disks and drives will be the same size and shape as current 5.25in MO types, and this is why Hewlett-Packard can already announce it will have jukeboxes of up to 10TB in a single cabinet once UDO is released next year.
According to HP, the new technology will be capable of delivering a maximum transfer rate that is 48 percent faster than the previous MO drives. Sony believes that optical technology will remain the best choice for applications where fast access is just as important as reliable storage.
Sony said its own tests show that UDO technology keeps data reliably for at least 30 years, while the access and throughput speeds are much faster than MO because of the increased linear bit density.
For now, with the latest 9.1GB MO drive and disk, Sony has released what looks like being the last in a series of increases in capacity that started with 650MB in 1988, before MO is superseded by UDO.
