Eight great levels - Storage Watch

Computer Technology Review, Feb, 2002 by Hal Glatzer

ML drives and media could well be marketed as ideal for "personal" storage (if Iomega were to brand them, it would surely stress that benefit), and could easily trump the speed of any tape-based system in or near its price range. Compared to DVD-recordable systems, ML write-speeds are faster, and both the drives and the media cost much less. Of course, 2GB is far smaller than the 5.2GB or (two-sided) 9.4GB capacity of DVDs. But for any application in which 2GB is enough, and/or a disk does not have to be widely distributed, an ML drive could be very attractive.

That said, ML could conceivably suffer the same fate as the "superfloppy" drives of the 1990s, which recorded unique, high-capcity disks--ranging from 2MB to 20MB--in addition to conventional 1.44MB floppies. But they arrived on the scene just as software and content distribution was migrating from floppies to CD-ROMs, and just as 650MB CD-writers were becoming affordable. The case for ML, now, has to be made in the face of a very strong market push to install DVD readers--not to mention DVD writers, some of which also write CDs! Fortunately, unlike superfloppy drives, ML drives impose no significant cost penalty over plain-vanilla CD-writers. For OEMs, integrators, and users, that 2GB capability comes practically free.

"The market is potentially huge," Campbell said, expressing the hope that ML-capable drives might represent 20 percent of all new CD-R/RW drives sold over the next three years. That would be millions--and it's not impossible. As the ASIC developer, he acknowledged that "The marketing of the drives is out of my hands. But I want them to make as big a splash as they can."