Future Optical Media

Future Optical Media

Future Optical Media

I not only remember when audio CDs came out, I remember what a really big deal they were. Audiophiles today of course all know that the bandwidth of an audio CD is less than that of a good old analog vinyl disk, but back then we were mesmerized by the new technology: You mean a laser actually reads the disc? It must be super high quality! I then remember ten years later being astounded by my first computer with a CD drive and the CD-ROM. I could never have imagined that a CD would do anything more than store music. Then I really flipped my lid when the CD burner came out. That device made me feel powerful indeed, even if it did take half a day to burn a single disk (providing you didn't encounter an error mid-way through ruining the process entirely).

But it always seems that optical media quickly falls behind that magnetic wonder horse- the hard drive. At this writing Blue Ray discs are fairly new (just fancy DVDs as DVDs are just fancy CDs), and DVDs can be double-layered giving you a total of about eight gigabytes of space. Hmm, not very much is it? The second problem with optical media, and it is a very serious problem, is its unreliability, both with disks that go bad and become unreadable and fragile laser readers that simply stop working.

Still, I remember how excited I was the first time I installed an Operating System from a CD, and how bowled over I was the first time I actually booted and ran an Operating System from a CD, bypassing the hard drive altogether (never mind that I couldn't write anything).

And actually, things still haven't changed much functionally, though optical disks are wildly popular as a passive media- watching movies, gaming and the like. But I believe that the reliability issues of optical media will be resolved and that one day discs will hold countless terabytes of information and will read-write much faster than today's hard drives. In with the light, out with the clunk!

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