Saturday, July 17, 2004
New DVD burners store information on two layers of a disc.
HARTFORD COURANT
In this era of rising real-estate prices, it's nice to see the cost of some acreage falling.
That's exactly what's happening in personal computing, where prices are plunging on vast tracts of open-disc storage space.
Never has the price of a megabyte of storage been cheaper. One hard drive advertised just last weekend offered 200 gigabytes of space for $100 (after discounts and rebates and such).
That's 50 cents a gigabyte, an astounding bargain. At that rate, the per-megabyte cost is an infinitesimal one-half of one-tenth of a penny.
Falling disc storage prices are crucial to driving the trend toward digital music, digital photos, digital video and more. After all, who'll use a digital camera to full advantage if it costs hundreds of dollars to store the photos?
It's possible that falling storage prices are even more important to computer users than increases in PC processor speeds.
Today's PCs are more than fast enough for Web surfing, e-mailing and even photo editing. And you only buy a new PC every couple of years. But you buy storage in the form of blank discs or extra hard drives much more often.
Looking back, looking ahead
Today's cheap storage prices are even more amazing in historical context.
A friend once predicted the big crossover point for personal computing would come when the price of a floppy disk fell to $1. At that price, he reasoned, it would finally be cheaper to store information on computer than it is on paper.
I'm talking now about the old 5-inch floppies, the ones that actually were floppy. They held about 256,000 bytes of data.
His math worked. A sheet of paper holds about 3,000 characters of information. So a 256K floppy would be the equivalent of about 85 sheets of typing paper, which coincidentally sold for about a buck.
Contrast that milestone with the 200-gigabyte drive mentioned above, which is the equivalent of about 800,000 of those old floppies. Only instead of costing $800,000, the drive costs $100. Talk about a fire sale.
And that's not even the cheapest form of storage available these days. Blank DVD discs, which hold about 4.7 gigabytes, can be found on sale for roughly $1 each, dropping the per-gigabyte price to less than 25 cents.
Dual-layer burners
Now comes so-called "dual layer" DVD burners, which nearly double the recording capacity of existing drives to store 8.5 gigabytes of data on a single disc.
As the name suggests, the dual-layer DVD burners cram even more data onto a single disc by storing information on each of two separate levels or layers. Better yet, the dual-layer format remains compatible with most television DVD players, so you'll still be able burn digital videos to disc and watch them on the tube.
As with all cutting-edge technologies, these dual-layer drives and discs, which are just beginning to appear at retail, will be pricey at first. But you can expect that within a couple of years or so, dual-layer discs will be on sale for about $1 each as well.
The result will be yet another round of falling prices on storage media, offering ever more space for ever less money.
It's probably just as well that doesn't happen in real estate. After all, would you like your house to be worth half as much next year? But it suits personal computing just fine.