Optical disks are dead - long live the optical disks?

It seems that our circular shiny friends have finally bitten the dust. With the growing availability of flash drives which provide superior capabilities, and a nearly ubiquitous high-speed internet connection allowing direct file sharing, CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays will soon go the way of floppy drives, VHS and audio cassettes. The entertainment and commercial software industries may still use disks because of their low cost, but sooner or later progress will hit Hollywood and Microsoft like an anvil, and disks will be entirely abandoned in favour of flash drives and internet file sharing.

In the future digital storage devices will shrink even more, this time in the third dimension, becoming entirely flat thumb-sized datacards easy to carry in one's wallet. Durable, universal, highly reusable and lacking any mechanical parts, flash drives will become the ultimate revolution in digital electronics. Not long is the day when flash memory will be effective enough to be used as an external as well as an internal storage module, replacing the bulky optical and magnetic disk drives.

I'm not installing a CD-ROM in the new desktop computer I'm getting next month. It's a matter of principle. I wish I could just as easily say no to the HDD.

Which flash drives/devices you are referrering to? the write-once, re-writeable, write-once read many times, the one that leaks charge as you scale it down, the very expensive SSD drive?

Lol, yeah ok! Get back to us when Flash memory can compete with a $5 blu-ray @25-50gb storage. And, regarding mechanical spindle drives… they'll be with us for a long time as well - and not just because of their price point. SSD's can fail, just like their mechanical brethren; but when they fail, they do so with little warning. Try explaining that to server admins.

Drithius said:

Lol, yeah ok! Get back to us when Flash memory can compete with a $5 blu-ray @25-50gb storage. And, regarding mechanical spindle drives… they'll be with us for a long time as well - and not just because of their price point. SSD's can fail, just like their mechanical brethren; but when they fail, they do so with little warning. Try explaining that to server admins.

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While I completely disagree with her post:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/MyMemory-32...1_9?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1331398835&sr=1-9

That's about 22 dollars. It's not that far off.

There are still several millions of potential customers in remote regions of core gaming markets who can't get fast enough internet for downloading full games. Maybe only 10-20%, but anyway, would the console manufacturers really be willing to leave them behind? And who would make the first step? MS saying "no optical drive" would open the door for Sony to say just the opposite and make it a USP, and vice versa.

A source claims that the next xbox will ship without an optical drive:
http://www.techspot.com/news/47737-source-claims-xbox-720-will-ship-without-optical-drive.html

I haven't had an optical drive hooked up in my PC for many years now. I have an old one I can hook up with an external IDE->USB adapter but I really have no need for it... I've only hooked it up once since 2008 and that was because I wanted to install OSX and make a dual-booting hackintosh. Which was a dumb idea.

Gorath said:

There are still several millions of potential customers in remote regions of core gaming markets who can't get fast enough internet for downloading full games.

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Yes. Online gaming is in fact a kind of gaming for a higher class - those who have broadband - compared to those who don't.

And it is always the remote regions whoch don't have broadband.

So, broadband-based gaming (be it online games or simple services like Steam) is, as a matter of fact, gaming limited to towns and to highly populated areas.

We are getting at least 2 classes in society here : Those who are connected and those who aren't.

They also said that hard-disk drives will reach their storage capacity limits in 2004 of 20 or 40 gbit per square inch! Commercial drives now have 300 - 400 gbit per square inch areal density and improving. Tapes and tape systems are also still alive and in development with excellent volume capacity and cost per gigabyte for archival purposes.

As for DVDs, Sony, Phillips and others are continuing the development of their multi-layer blu-rays and other stuff in the background (floptical disks .. etc.).

And I still need some old DVDs to put my tea cups on!

Drithius said:

Lol, yeah ok! Get back to us when Flash memory can compete with a $5 blu-ray @25-50gb storage. And, regarding mechanical spindle drives… they'll be with us for a long time as well - and not just because of their price point. SSD's can fail, just like their mechanical brethren; but when they fail, they do so with little warning. Try explaining that to server admins.

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I'd suggest educating yourself a bit on the subject:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,review-32241.html

The writable blu ray market is tiny, almost nobody uses them. Last time I checked writable DVDs still outsold them close to 100 to 1 and I doubt very much has changed since then.

We have a long way to go before optical discs are dead. Flash drives with the same capacity as blu-ray discs, and similar read speeds, are prohibitively expensive for distribution means and most internet users in the US, and many parts of Europe, don't have the bandwidth to make downloading of large files a realistic alternative.

Blu-Rays and DVD's are still super cheap to manufacturer and distribute. Until download or flash drives can match that, discs will still rule. That will change, but we're not there yet.

SSDs are steadily becoming more reliable and financially available, whereas external electronic memory modules are a dime a dozen even today. Obviously progress will hit poorly developed/remote regions last, this doesn't mean that the civilized world will rely on obsolete technology any longer than it has to. The only reason I'm not getting an SSD for my new PC right now is knowing that in just a few years - if not months - their storage capacity will grow and their price will fall, leaving me with an overpriced SSD I can't return. Guess I'll have a couple of HDDs to add to my collection of antique VHSs, floppies and DVDs.

I still actually buy DVDs to backup stuff on but to be honest if it was completely up to me i'd buy a huge external HDD for that purpose but i'm guessing that sooner or later the optical disks are going to die with the external HDDs and the cloud storage that always you to backup your files online on the servers of the provider so it will die eventually but still its being widely used these days but probably just for storage not moving data from a place to another i think a flash drive is more convenient, faster and much simpler for that job.

I find hard drives that aren't constantly used have a longer lifespan than most of my DVDRs. I can't even read most of the first ones I wrote. My CDRs from the 90s still mostly work, but my DVDRs from 8 years ago? Not a one can be read.