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I have not used Floppy Disks a lot - but I have had my share as I started of my experience with computers in CLIs. Over the years, the scope of data storage from a consumer perspective has grown in scale - from floppy disks to TeraDisks. Not long back, Vinyas had written about Blu Ray disks, and now Sourjya writes about TeraDisks in the near future.

Let us look at how the storage was used by people, how they are used presently, and what would the TeraDisk mean in that perspective.

Floppy Disks

There were two types of floppy disks. The partially flexible 5.2″ floppy disks that could store 1.2 MB of data. And then, there was the 3.2″ floppy disk that could store 1.4 MB which came in a sturdy plastic casing. This was quite enough during those times (back in late 90s) when the OS could be booted out of a floppy disk. It was quite sufficeint for the restricted consumer market. At most, it was used for storing RTF (Rich Text Formatted) documents, and spread sheets. The more common use was to store documents in vanilla ASCII format. The The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle amounts to just around 576 kB and contains 12 novels. This is not the usual size of the documents that people would work with. It would range around 1 kB to 10 kB. That meant, one could store around 100 documents in a single floppy disk.

Compact Disk - CDROM

With the optical technology, the market for data storage grew to a much lesser geeky audience. You could store upto 650 MB to 700 MB on a CD, and that meant cosumers could generate and store multi media files. The documents, even when converted to proprieatary formated documents did not amount to much. The above set of Sherlock Holmes novels, when saved as a Microsoft Word Document would amount to 1.4 MB. It did not warrant for the use of CDs to that extent. The CDs were used for storing images, music and videos.

The market had remained stable for a long time, and the CD has moved to a larger audience, with more people invovled in creating images, sounds and video. The people using CDs for storing the vidoes that they created has remained limited. A 10 minute of high quality digital video can easily scale to 500-600 MB and it may feel a bit suffocating to manage it with th 700 MB ceiling of CDs.

The scale though is very apt for image and music files. A high DPI image file would be around 1 MB to 5 MB. Music files at a decent bitrate would also be in that range. That again meant, that you could store around 100 image and music files on a single CD.

DVD

The DVD market grew into the need for high quality movies, in multiple languages. They were of course, used for storing data - a DVD could store around 5 GB of data. But the scope of storage is measured more in terms of minutes of music or video that can be stored.

The DVD did expand the scope for consumer to use it for storing their ‘home’ videos, or the videos they created for any purposes. If we go by a thumb rule that clips of videos would be around 500 MB, that meant that we could store only about 10 video files in a single disk. This capacity limited the use of DVD for storing intermediate clips. That is still served by high capacity HD (hard disks).

Blu Ray and HD-DVD

These are the emerging technologies. A Blu Ray disk can hold approximately 5 times the data of DVD and a HD-DVD can do about 3 times. Both are aimed at the video market, and are presently competing against each other to become a standard. When and if a standard is chosen by the market among the two, it will be another step - albeit a small step - towards the use of videos by the consumers like they did with text files earlier, images and sounds later on. That is because, going by the same patter we did for the other storages, a Blu Ray disk could store around 50 video files and a HD-DVD could store around 30 video files.

TeraDisk

The capacity of 1 TB shoots the number of (500 MB) video files to around 2000. This would definetly be the point in time when the consumers would start using video files with same fluency as they do with text, image and sound files. The time would not be actually when it is possible to store 1 TB in a disk, but it would be when you could create disk drives that are affordable to the market. It would have to pass through the same stages of evolution like the CD or DVD, where the initial releases to the market would be as ‘read’ devices before affordable ‘read-and-write’ devices are released.

Would you skip technologies?

Do note that, I did this analysis on the assumption that these data storage devices are used by the general consumers and not enterprises. Also, for me, I would say that I can use a particular data storage for a particular format of file, when I am able to store multiple versions of a file I am working on at the same place.

Let me elaborate this a bit. When I work, I like to keep track of all the revisions. When I draft a document, I keep all the different versions. When I create artwork, it is very important to save the file at different points of time, so that I can get back to it at a later point and correct something if required.

As of now, I am not that comfortable in working with videos due to limiting of the data storage. That keeps me from working on video formats and tempts me to wait until TeraDisk (or anything that is in that range) come to market.

So would you skip technologies and wait for the next step before handling a lot of video data?