Storage Special: Personal Storage

Storage gets portable

The personal storage market is in flux. Several exciting options have been launched in the market, including pen drivers and DVD writers, but consumers are slow to respond, says Prashant L Rao. Once PCs with USB drives account for the bulk of the installed base of computers, that too will change

Dual writers that write to both the ‘+’ and ‘-’ formats of DVD media are expected to be the product of choice soon for PC users who want to stack huge amounts of data on a single DVD disc, says Sanjeev Gupta

There was a time when personal storage used to mean your PC’s hard drive and a box of floppies. Those days are gone. Today you have a profusion of choices when it comes to storing your documents and taking them along with you.

Personal storage II—USB drives and DVD writers

The latest gizmos to hit the personal storage scene are as different as fish and fowl. USB flash memory drives (aka pen drives) plug into a computer’s USB port to offer 32 to 256 MB of storage. Sony’s Microvault is a pocket-sized flash memory device that works with USB 1.1 and USB 2.

With digital gadgets such as digicams and handycams slowly moving into the mainstream, the future is bright for compact storage. R Manikandan, LG Electronics India’s DGM for sales & marketing of IT products says, "I feel it [the growing popularity of digital gadgets] will lead to a proliferation of compact storage options, since these activities will lead to a lot of data being generated, ultimately requiring storage capacity."

The other newcomer on the storage block is the DVD writer. It’s great for archiving your data with 4.7 GB of space on each DVD. DVD writers are a nascent format; as of now they come with middling speeds and relatively high prices. That’ll change by year-end as DVD writers move into the mainstream.

Carry that data

CD-R discs are the best way to take your data around. CD writers are cheap (approximately Rs 3,000) and CD-ROM drives (that read discs burned on CD writers) are ubiquitous. Best of all, today you can burn an entire disc in a few minutes. That said, the 700 MB capacity of a CD-R/RW disc isn’t quite enough for doing a one-click backup of your entire hard drive, but it can be very useful for carrying your documents around.

In your pocket

In terms of being compact and offering sufficient storage capacity, USB flash drives are amazing. Unfortunately, these devices are yet to catch on in a big way. The primary deterrent is the lack of USB support on PCs sold before 2000-01. Expect these drives to start gaining ground when the number of USB-ready PCs starts to account for a significant proportion of the market. PCs shipped in the last few years qualify but a lot of PCs in India are four to six years old and they don’t work with USB devices.

While the growth of newfangled storage gadgets is driven in part by the proliferation of digital cameras and handycams, demand for such devices hasn’t caught up.

Ashish Gupta, product manager, Optical Media Storage at Samsung India says, "Digicams and digital storage are not mass products [yet]. Globally we sell pen drives but we are yet to launch the product in India."

On a DVD

DVD writers are the ideal solution but as DVD-ROM drives needed for reading DVD (+-) RW discs aren’t anywhere as popular as CD-ROM drives. DVD remains the portable storage medium of the future with limited popularity for now.

Back it up

Backing up even a 20 GB hard drive is no joke, as capacities have doubled and will soon quadruple. While tape is the backup medium of choice for enterprises, personal backup has traditionally been limited to floppies and, of late, CD-Rs. Unfortunately, you have to spend a considerable amount of time just figuring out what to backup and what to leave behind as there’s a substantial mismatch between the size of your hard disk and what fits onto a CD-R (700 MB). You’ll need dozens of CD-Rs if you decide to backup your entire hard disk. Most of us opt to pick and choose, which in turn leads us to take backups on an infrequent basis. That’s a recipe for disaster.

A potential solution to this messy problem is the DVD writer. While the models on sale carry hefty price tags (Rs 13,500 to Rs 16,500), prices should drop significantly in the next six to nine months. DVD standards are yet to be consolidated. Pundits expect this to take place by end-2003. "DVD standards are ambiguous. There’s still the split between the plus and minus camps. We expect consolidation to take place by year end," says Gupta. By December, drives with the ability to read both the plus and minus standards should be commonplace.

Iomega recently launched a 4x dual format drive that reads and records onto CD-R or RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RW, in addition to reading DVD-ROM and CD-ROMs. "Dual writers that write to both the ‘+’ and ‘-’ formats of DVD media are expected to be the product of choice soon for PC users who want to stack a huge amount of data on a single DVD disc," says Sanjeev Gupta, senior manager for Business Development, Iomega Pacific.

"DVD-R is increasingly getting accepted," says Manikandan. LG’s latest DVD writers support multiple formats. Manikandan believes that one of the major factors limiting the growth of the DVD market is DVD media pricing. The nature of DVD usage is another bugbear. DVDs are equated with entertainment in India, storage on DVD hasn’t picked up due to the high cost of DVD-R discs. "The day DVDs are used for storage, the market would surely pick up," adds Manikandan.

DVD writers are available at both 2x and 4x write speeds. At 2.7 Mbps the write speed of a DVD 2x drive is a far cry from the CD 2x speed (300 Kbps). Still, using a 2x DVD writer means a wait of half an hour to burn a DVD-R disc. Though a 4x drive can burn a DVD-R in fifteen minutes, that’s still a fair bit of time when compared to the couple of minutes you spend burning a CD-R on a 40x or faster CD writer (the latest ones work at 52x).

Through the crystal ball

Speeds need to pick up before DVD writers become a mass option. That will happen in the medium term and eventually DVD writers will replace CD writers as the best option for personal data backup.

Don’t expect a DVD writer with your new PC anytime soon though. The chances of even CD writers or combo drives (DVD-ROM/CD-R/RW) becoming standard equipment on branded PCs by end-2003 are slim. "With reducing prices and need for more storage, these options will have higher attach rates with [new] PCs, but the possibility of these becoming standard by the end of this year is not seen," says Gupta.

Pen drives could replace floppies but it will take time. Floppies have survived far too many so called ‘killers’ to be written off. They’re cheap, a box of ten can be got for Rs 130 and, for documents, they’re good enough. The convenience of copying entire directories en masse onto a USB flash device can’t be denied, however.

Hard drives will continue to get bigger offering more GB for your rupee. 40 GB hard drives are standard issue with new PCs this year. By year-end that’s expected to double to 80 GB. While much hype has been generated about MP3s and videos, with the pathetic state of Net connectivity in the country, most of us are going to end up filling our hard disks with applications. Data’s still going to be a few megabytes at most, unless you’re editing multimedia files on your PC. In a couple of years, USB should be the norm and then it could be bye, bye floppy, but don’t hold your breath waiting.

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