Future of Data Storage

[Timothy Kotthoff]

Regardless of your platform preference, the future of data storage is getting extremely interesting.

I thought this article had some interesting insight and was worthy of sharing with the group.

http://broadcastengineering.com/storage_networking/solid-state-drives-beginning-0111/

For those who are Apple users, this could explain a lot of why Apple is "exiting" the pro market. To me, instead of exiting, it points to a transition or shift to possibly something better.

Cheers everyone!

Tim

 

[Christoffer Glans]

This is a bit off topic but...
I would first and foremost like to see cheaper archiving. Systems like LTO-5 are really expensive for most people and there are limits to regular harddrives. I am not comfortable having stuff on my drives. After a while you can't get a day work done because you have so much data to take care of from past jobs. It's not a problem today, but we can't keep making external drive archiving forever, we need something good for our data and pretty fast.... I'm talking about a decade of digital files that will disappear from this era in history if it's not stored correctly.

Especially since we are now digitally storing really old original works that will become dust soon and they will only exist as digital data soon, they must be preserved.
Today we think faster and faster, but we think in shorter and shorter time spans. Long ago people actually thought about long term preservation, if they hadn't we wouldn't have had material from the 16th century so well preserved.

Who today actually look at their stuff, stop and think for a second about how it will survive 100 years into the future... or 500 years?

This is a philosophical question that is very important. We need to know what to do with the digital world. Clouds and stuff are great for short term, but they only exist as long as that company is doing business.
Where is holographic storage? Where is tapes or discs capable of surviving 1000 years? It's a golden age and opportunity for us today to preserve old material from our past and present material made now onto a non-destructive storage that will survive a long time.
Just imagine how it would have been if people could record their lives during the 11th century and make us do playback today and view it? How much would we not learn and know about the past if that were the case?

But if nothing is done to create a long term storage, some kind of standard that isn't defined by corporate wars need to become a reality, something that everybody decide on using for preservation into the future. It might be on a large scale, a type of "crypt" for information, but that creates other philosophical questions about who is to decide what data to store and not. But to get real, some kind of storage for the everyman, just like anyone in the past could get a notebook and just write their minds out on paper.
That is my vision, a storage that makes us comfortable that what I do today will stand the tests of time... otherwise, everything you do today will be gone, very soon. So much hard work into something that will be gone is not putting the mind at ease.