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Storage technologies are changing at a remarkable pace, with permanent and removable
hard drive technologies getting cheaper every day. For instance, in the last 5 years,
the average cost of a megabyte of hard drive storage has plummeted from $2.50/MB to
around $0.20/MB, and the media costs for removable hard drives are now nearing $0.10
for the IOmega JAZ drive. The performance of drives has improved dramatically during
the same time. Concomitantly, tape and CD-R technologies have continued to drop in price
and improve in performance, with CD-R units now approaching $500 for a good 2X drive and
$1000 for a 4X drive. The real attraction to CD-R is the cheap media - blank CD-R media
is available in bulk for $7 to $8, making the media cost for a 650MB CD-R disk just more
than a penny per megabyte. Software is now available that makes recording CDs almost
transparent. For today at least, the low cost of the media, the 10 to 30 year life expectancy
of the media, the relatively low cost of CD recorders,
the ubiquity of CD-ROM players on today's computers, and advances in recording hardware
and software makes CD-R the archival technology of choice for today, IMO.
For reviews of CD recorders, and prices, see the following links as well as the links
at the end of this page.
For more about CD-R technology, see
CD Shopper from 9/95.
CD-R disks can be played back on normal CD-ROM players, and depending on the use, can support
today's multiple speed drives. The original "1X" drives had data throughput rates of 150KB/sec
and seek times of 800ms. The latest drives released by Sony, Pioneer, Hitachi, and NEC
are all 8X (data throughput of more than 1MB/sec), with Pioneer announcing a high speed
10X drive available later this summer.
For a partial evaluation of the performance of some CD-ROM recorders, see:
Here in the Medical School, a local expert who can help you decide which CD-ROM recorder
(and archiving technology) is right for you is Tim Skimina, x3-8222. For purchasing working systems, they
often deal with MEDIASTORE in Orange, California, (714) 997-5551.
CD-R is only one of many possible technologies. One of the new, heavily hyped storage technologies
is DVD. DVD will store 4.6 gigabytes of data on a single 3.5" disk. DVD originally stood for Digital Video Disk, but due to manufacturers' desire to
capture as large a market as possible for the technology, the acronym now stands for
"Digital Versatile Disk". DVD won't be shipping until 1997, but the projections are for fairly
inexpensive units to be available from the very start, much like the ZIP/EZ135 war. DVD is likely
to supplant CD-ROM technologies, but DVD readers will be able to read ISO9660-compliant CD-ROM disks,
meaning that for the next 10 years or so, you will be able to access data that you have stored on
CD-ROM on your state-of-the-art DVD drive.
For more about DVD, see:
We have seen the future, and...
