A dark horse for the set top storage?.........
techweb.com
A Drive To Get Excited About
Robert Faletra
While flat-panel displays seemed to be the rage at Comdex, they were not the
newest or, for that matter, the most interesting new technology at the show.
One of the more exciting advances I've seen in some time is coming in the
form of removable storage from Castlewood Systems, Pleasanton, Calif. If
Castlewood founder Syed Iftikar and his crew can execute, they may just
have solved a number of storage problems for both the business and home
environments.
Castlewood developed and has begun shipping to OEMs an ORB drive and
removable diskette that can hold 2.2 Gbytes and has a transfer rate of 12.2
Mbytes per second. The result is essentially a removable hard drive that is fast
enough to not only store data, but also to play video and audio, something
tape has not been able to accomplish to date.
Iftikar, one of the founders of both Syquest and Seagate, claims by next fall
Old news, but worth rereading.....
edtn.com
out that 70 to 80 percent of a digital set-top
architecture is determined by software required by service providers
rather than hardware that box manufacturers choose.
If software dictates harware than the fact that sparc won't run windows CE isn't optimal...........
"For us at Sony, we don't want to be in the business
of manufacturing dumb boxes forever," said Kubota. "We think it's a
waste of our energy and resources to stay with the business of
producing just simple, dumb set-tops."
In Kubota's view, the Media Station, which is now being defined,
will be a product through which consumers can easily access any
digital medium at home, whether stored in DVD, VCR or hi-fi, or
broadcast via digital satellite or cable. "It's a gateway where digital
consumer appliances networked via i-Link [the IEEE 1394 serial
interface] at home can be easily controlled, by using TV as a user
interface."
In essence, Kubota said, "Media Station is a media receiver, media
distributor and media controller, whose key technology components
are an operating system, embedded CPU, middleware and i-Link."
Sony, however, is not billing Media Station as a home server. "When
a storage device gets cheaper, it could be incorporated into a Media
Station, but a server is not the primary purpose of this Media
Station."
Other companies are working on similar product concepts. "We
believe that the concept for a home information terminal is valid,"
said Hitachi's Tago. "The technologies that go inside a box, as far as
its data processing capabilities are concerned, are very similar to
those used in a PC. But most likely, we won't need to run Microsoft
Office or Excel on that terminal."
Asked how important a role Java or Windows CE may play in the
new generation of smart home terminal, neither Hitachi nor Sony had
a definitive answer. "Either one -- Java or Windows CE -- could be
a part of the answer to what we may need in the future, but we are
not seeing a real demand for it for what we want to do now," said
Tago. "As far as the operating system is concerned, the only
requirement is that it must be real-time, nothing more for now."
Said Sony's Kubota, "We believe Java is going to be a very
important language to tie different platforms together." Would Sony
find a need to run Java or Windows CE on its set-top on the
Japanese market today? Kubota answered, "Not right now. I don't
know if there are applications necessary to run Windows CE now in
Japan. It may be overkill."
Castlewood will be shipping a diskette capable of holding 8 Gbytes, with a
12-Gbyte capacity not far behind.
There are a lot of reasons why I think Castlewood is onto something here.
First and foremost, if ORB proves to be a reliable and quality product, it
easily solves the problem of filled fixed hard drives. The ability to pop in
another disk once a fixed drive or ORB is filled is a lot easier than
downloading to a server in order to free up space or replacing the current
drive with another, larger-capacity one.
I don't personally see this technology replacing the fixed-drive system entirely
in the PC because each diskette would have to hold the operating system. But
there are advantages to using it as an adjunct. In the case of the home,
children could have a diskette with all their games on it while parents could
have another with important household data. In essence, each family member
could customize their own machine.
This opens up new business opportunities in the consumer market. The music
business is already going through some major distribution changes. This drive
could provide the ability to download music or, for that matter, video via the
Internet, pop the disk out of the PC and plug it into the VCR or stereo for
viewing or listening. The physical size of the drive is small enough to allow for
portable-size devices to be developed for both video and audio using this
technology. One disk can hold as many as five of today's music CDs.
One of the problems with Microsoft's WebTV and competing offerings has
been hard-drive capacity. Castlewood's medium allows for an easy upgrade
solution and the ability to easily transfer data from the set-top box to the PC, if
necessary.
Of course, one of the things this medium also allows for is the easy pirating of
software, whether it is PC applications, operating systems, music or video. A
problem, yes, but something that has always been a problem. I always chuckle
a bit when I hear one of Microsoft's top executives spouting off about piracy
when I know that, as they are speaking, there are probably dozens of
Microsoft employees standing in front of copy machines in Redmond with
copyrighted material sitting on the glass scanner. |
