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DVD to lead the way in storage
TRENDS
T HESE days, the motto for removable-storage devices seems to be: ''More and more, faster and faster''.
The growing storage requirements of software today is one of the reasons driving the need for ever-increasing drive capacities and retrieval speeds.
The Internet _ and the gobs of data people download from it onto their computers _ is another.
It's becoming clear that the future of removable-storage devices (CD-Rom drives, Zip drives, and the like) belongs to the technology known as DVD (digital versatile disc).
For example, Hitachi, one of the world's largest consumer-electronics companies, announced plans at the computer show CeBIT '98 in Germany to begin mass production of DVD disk drives this month.
DVD disks look like today's CD-Rom and audio compact discs, but they can hold much more data _ 4.7 gigabytes in their standard, single-sided configurations and 17 GBs in the forthcoming dual-sided, dual-density versions.
The appeal of DVD is obvious. The reusable versions of DVD disks, called DVD-RAM (for random access memory), can hold up to 5.2 GBs of data _ more than many hard drives.
Manufacturers such as Hitachi are working hard to develop DVD-RAM drives that will also read the standard DVD-Rom and CD-Rom disks.
Nick Sundby, product manager at Hitachi Europe, is convinced that DVD will ''change the PC landscape drastically over the next few years''.
Hitachi assumes that 70 million DVD disk drives will be sold worldwide by the year 2000. Manufacturers are already lining up their DVD products for the marketplace.
In June, Panasonic is scheduled to offer a new DVD-RAM drive that will be backward-compatible with most other CD-Rom and DVD formats and whose disks will hold as much as 5.2 GBs.
That capacity, according to Panasonic, is enough to store 5,200 digital photographs taken at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, or eight hours' worth of CD-quality music.
Initially, such drives will be pricey _ typically over US$500. But industry experts expect prices to fall as production capacities increase.
''Fit for large-storage jobs'' is the slogan of Panasonic's new 24x CD-Rom LF-1007 drive.
In addition to working with standard CD-Roms, the drive is also capable of writing to so-called phase-change optical disks (PD cartridges).
Phase-change technology uses a laser to heat the disk's surface and change its physical state from amorphous to crystalline or crystalline back to amorphous. Using this technology, you can write and overwrite as many times as you like on to a single-sided removable cartridge.
According to Panasonic, the phase-change disks can be reused up to 500,000 times and have a capacity of 650 megabytes. The drive automatically recognises if the inserted medium is a CD-Rom or a PD cartridge. This makes it easy to record and play in turn.
One problem with most DVD-Rom drives (ones that read DVDs rather than read and write them) is that they cannot read today's very popular CD-R disks. CD-R stands for ''CD Recordable''. They're the disks used by CD drives that can write to as well as read from CD-Roms.
NEC will also soon release a DVD drive that will be backward-compatible with virtually all DVD and CD types _ even CD-R disks. Its Combo DV-1700A can read DVD-Roms as well as read from and write to CD-Rs.
That allows the new NEC drive to process DVD-Roms, CD-Roms and CD-Rs. The drive is scheduled for worldwide release in May. NEC expects to attract customers who need a cost-effective combination of a DVD-Rom drive and other recordable media.
It's also becoming clear that 32x will be the new standard speed for CD-Rom drives.
Acer, for example, presented the new model CD 632A at the CeBIT show in Hannover recently. The drive reads all common CD formats, including audio and photo CDs. The new Acer drive is scheduled to ship next month.
Pioneer will soon offer a 32x drive with ''slot-in'' technology. This allows the drive to operate horizontally as well as vertically. dpa
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