"Blu-Ray has five years left" - Samsung

[Alberto Caprioglio]

Are we talking about storage for professional/personal archival/collection on a shelf or about storage medium/drive for daily use (=high speed access/reading/writing, ergonomics...)?

It's not just as simple as saying "hello, look what I have found: it's good to have 500 movies on hard disk (or clay or whatever)"

The main problem is this damned fact (what a news, isn't it?) that not much has changed with time, and it seems that in 2010 like in 1990 when the mortal, ordinary people were prohibited from knowing what on earth a magneto optical disk was - as if one's data were not serious enough to be safe, as if individuals could not be musicians, writers, photographers, videographers, filmakers or anithing, therefore couldn't own valuable data enough to be worth keeping safe... Has anything changed in the approach, apart from the phisiological increase storage capacity and speed?
Do people have a real choice between cheap plastic medium lasting few years and then fissolve... and reliable, long term archival medium?

I thing it's still the same.
While in some other fields not too far away, there have been opposite examples, examples of professional approach borrowed by non professional use - professional mediums such as open reel recorders commonly found in good home hi-fi setups till some decades ago - the data storage seems it necessarily must be a pain for individuals, professional or not.
Why, for any serious, let alone professional, use, are the hundred of millions individuals must share the same tools made for the least serious and most casual use?

How is it possible that a musician, a film maker, a graphic studio, a designer, a... oooh eat your disk somebody who is/needs/feels like/wants to be serious about a simple (but in his/her case important) activity as saving data, has to use exactly the same unreliable solutions as any 12 years old hopeless lazy child with no interests in life and who couldn't care less normally does when such monkey only has to dumps somewhere a bunch of hopeless songs taken from another failed drinking cousin's old cassettes?
There is something wrong in different needs being treated all the same, and all at the lowest possible term.

Our needs can't be the same as those of a next door grandmother, babies and boring small criminals. I see choice that are only apparent and not real, like square feet of different colors TDK VERBATIM SONY... DVDs, oh yes, the fantastical freedom given by the differentiation +-R/RW, you know when the shop can put them, when only to find DVD-RAM is obviously an heresy that no student/shop has ever heard of... DVD or hard disk?? is that a choice? have any of the mediums available have anything in common with realiable?
no, all in the same bag, the your fruit seller's cousin and the ambulant barber with one leg all save their data on the same joke.
Yes, I know this sounds quite exacly like the kind of message we seem to be designated to recieve by advertising, but... it is a joke! there ARE differences amd not like in benetton advertising where it is all pretending now the eskimo in the north pole and the masai in the savannah forcely wear to show the same sweater but is accepted because it's a photograph. I can't force important data into the same dump designed for storing children's school pig grunt samples, be it the usual 500 giga hard disk or the USB pendrive with. Those doesn't make a choice, these are not proper technologies for serioulsy saving any kind of data, they are made for buying and throwing away in one year and use in that time like a pair of shoes. Hey, shoes may last longer, bacause some shoes are well made, and you CAN choose shoes, unlike recording media.
In fact, I prefer to archive RED data on shoes than on disk.

[Bill Goehring]

Are we talking about storage for professional/personal archival/collection on a shelf or about storage medium/drive for daily use (=high speed access/reading/writing, ergonomics...)?

It's not just as simple as saying "hello, look what I have found: it's good to have 500 movies on hard disk (or clay or whatever)"

The main problem is this damned fact (what a news, isn't it?) that not much has changed with time, and it seems that in 2010 like in 1990 when the mortal, ordinary people were prohibited from knowing what on earth a magneto optical disk was - as if one's data were not serious enough to be safe, as if individuals could not be musicians, writers, photographers, videographers, filmakers or anithing, therefore couldn't own valuable data enough to be worth keeping safe... Has anything changed in the approach, apart from the phisiological increase storage capacity and speed?
Do people have a real choice between cheap plastic medium lasting few years and then fissolve... and reliable, long term archival medium?

I thing it's still the same.
While in some other fields not too far away, there have been opposite examples, examples of professional approach borrowed by non professional use - professional mediums such as open reel recorders commonly found in good home hi-fi setups till some decades ago - the data storage seems it necessarily must be a pain for individuals, professional or not.
Why, for any serious, let alone professional, use, are the hundred of millions individuals must share the same tools made for the least serious and most casual use?

How is it possible that a musician, a film maker, a graphic studio, a designer, a... oooh eat your disk somebody who is/needs/feels like/wants to be serious about a simple (but in his/her case important) activity as saving data, has to use exactly the same unreliable solutions as any 12 years old hopeless lazy child with no interests in life and who couldn't care less normally does when such monkey only has to dumps somewhere a bunch of hopeless songs taken from another failed drinking cousin's old cassettes?
There is something wrong in different needs being treated all the same, and all at the lowest possible term.

Our needs can't be the same as those of a next door grandmother, babies and boring small criminals. I see choice that are only apparent and not real, like square feet of different colors TDK VERBATIM SONY... DVDs, oh yes, the fantastical freedom given by the differentiation +-R/RW, you know when the shop can put them, when only to find DVD-RAM is obviously an heresy that no student/shop has ever heard of... DVD or hard disk?? is that a choice? have any of the mediums available have anything in common with realiable?
no, all in the same bag, the your fruit seller's cousin and the ambulant barber with one leg all save their data on the same joke.
Yes, I know this sounds quite exacly like the kind of message we seem to be designated to recieve by advertising, but... it is a joke! there ARE differences amd not like in benetton advertising where it is all pretending now the eskimo in the north pole and the masai in the savannah forcely wear to show the same sweater but is accepted because it's a photograph. I can't force important data into the same dump designed for storing children's school pig grunt samples, be it the usual 500 giga hard disk or the USB pendrive with. Those doesn't make a choice, these are not proper technologies for serioulsy saving any kind of data, they are made for buying and throwing away in one year and use in that time like a pair of shoes. Hey, shoes may last longer, bacause some shoes are well made, and you CAN choose shoes, unlike recording media.
In fact, I prefer to archive RED data on shoes than on disk.

um...yeah. wow.
thanks for that, but, really, don't hold back.

[Tim Wildenhain]

Are we talking about storage for professional/personal archival/collection on a shelf or about storage medium/drive for daily use (=high speed access/reading/writing, ergonomics...)?......

I've not a clue what you're trying to say. Giving you the benefit of the doubt I think something is lost in translation.

The only thing i was able to get from this is somehow data storage seems to be the same no matter where you look. Well this is both true and untrue at the same time. When it comes to optical media; a proven untrustworthy as a serious archival medium; I can believe you're right. But otherwise, tape backups and harddrives; really there isn't any other way. It's the same at the bottom of the heap and the top of the heap; the only difference is quality control which you pay for. Which is why you're probably not buying $60 drives for your archival means, but rather spending the $120 for a different brand with the same speed. What more of a difference are you expecting?

A pro artists pencil is not any more expensive than a cheap No.2 pencil in use by students and amatures alike. Some things just dont change based on wether you're using it professionally or casually.

[brainburst]

You know there really isn't any technical reason that there isn't a cost effective high capacity archival storage. It's all about patents and the not so free market. The reality is that the free market is not at all efficient at creating open and ubiquitous standards which would lower costs for end users. Patents lock up a technology and drive up costs. The free market left to its own devices loves incompatibility and vendor lockin. That's why I laugh when I hear people quip "close enough for government work". Give me a break. If private enterprise were responsible for our highway system we'd have to change vehicles every time we crossed state lines and use a different fuel. Does anyone recall networking before the Government standardized on tcp/ip?. Remember Banyan Vines? IPX?

Instead of creating a standard that could be implemented easily, manufacturers work to differentiate at the expense of refining existing technology.

My prediction is that someone will create very high capacity Read Only Flash with middling write speeds but fast read speeds. It will be cheap because the expense is always driven by write speeds. For an archival medium this is not quite as important.