| Backbone TV |
NEW Geoweb video
|
|
|
| Remember floppies? No, we don’t either |
November 11, 2004 |
By Jim Harris
Plummeting storage prices are creating new media and killing off old ones. In the process, this is threatening the core products of once-famous companies, while changing the way we work with computers, and ultimately changing the lifestyles of early adopters.
USB FLASH DRIVES (UFDS)
USB flash drives — also known as pen drives or thumb drives — were hot back to- school items this fall. These flash media devices weigh less than an ounce and are a few centimetres long. In October 2004, you could pick up a 256MB drive for about $50, and a 512MB drive for as little as $70. A UFD just plugs into a USB port on a computer and you can transfer files to the drive — so it serves as a hard drive. A 256MB drive can hold almost 200 floppies,
if you even remember what those were.
Kids are taking their pen drive to school with all their homework on it, plugging it into a school computer, working on projects, re-saving changes to
the drive and taking their work home to their own computers.
This paints a picture of what the future will hold for computing: being able to walk around with all of your essential files on a tiny drive and using
any computer to access them. While the coolest notebook on the market today is Sony’s new Vaio X505 which weighs a mere 1.8 lbs, even that seem like a
luggable compared to a thumb drive.
The largest UFD available is 4GB and pricey at $1,700, but 2GB drives are only $261 and 1GB $164. By the end of 2005 it’s likely that 8GB drives will be
available.
UFDs are killing Zip drives, which used a floppy-like disk to store 100MB of data. And the rise of UFD MP3 players threaten the dominance of hard-disk
based players like the iPod. The iPod is the most popular MP3 player with about 50 per cent of the market share, but harddisk based MP3 players don’t like being dropped, while flash players don’t mind.
As flash storage capacities expand, the iPod’s dominance will be threatened. A 2GB MP3 flash player will hold 2,000 minutes of tunes, or 33 hours of music.
For most people, that’s enough.
MULTI-FUNCTIONAL MP3S
Creative Labs was one of the first companies to promote a multi-functional flash device. The MuVo TX FM is comprised of a 256MB flash drive which stores MP3 files and slips into a tiny device sleeve.
The sleeve holds a AAA battery and has an LCD screen, and adds an FM tuner and a voice recorder. This 4-in-1 device is less than $200. Similarly, SanDisk’s Cruzer Micro Flash Drive fits into the company’s Companion drive, turning it into an MP3 player.
HARD DRIVES
Tape backup systems are threatened with extinction in the long term, especially for small- and medium-sized businesses.
The price of hard disk storage has been plummeting for years, as capacities have been growing. For instance, in 1992 it cost thousands of dollars per gigabyte for hard disk space but today you can buy a 200GB hard disk for $140, or about 70 cents per gigabyte.
These plummeting prices change the economics of whole industries.
Rather than back up computer data to tape, many companies are copying their systems directly to swappable hard disks. Why back up computer systems on tape when you can just back up hard disk to a hard disk? The transfer rates are blisteringly fast and data hard disks aren’t linear as tapes are.
This means you can access data immediately when restoring, rather than having to find a particular point on a tape.
As prices continue to fall for flash memory and hard disk space, all sorts of new applications become economically feasible, and whole industries will
continue to be shaken up.
|
|
|
| Green Innovation |
|
|
| Top 300 Issue |
 
|
| Gadget of the Week (Canadian) |
|
Pick the best 3G for you
RIM Blackberry Bold
Choosing the right smartphone is an important decision, and here’s the good news: while both the new iPhone and the Bold are excellent, the feel is entirely different, making it easy to choose.
more>>
|
| Gadget of the Week (Japanese) |
Sounds of Japan
Why record just the visual when you can capture the sounds as well.
more>> |
| Backblog RSS feed |
Click to subscribe  |
|
sponsored by 
