The Best And Worst Of Storage In The '90s - News Briefs - Column

Computer Technology Review, Jan, 2000

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.