Storage – Page 10 – Digital-Lifestyles

CeBIT: DVD Burners Maturing, New Products on the Way

More manufacturers are producing multi-format DVD burners than ever before and prices for the hardware are falling rapidly. Some of the uncertainty has been taken out of the format as Sony and Pioneer make drives that support both DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW disk creation and reading.

However, 16x drives (rotating at 10,800 revolutions per second!) are near the maximum speed possible for DVD, so since we can spin the disk much faster, the next battle is to fit more on the disk. Storing data more densely on the layer will allow faster read times (the laser doesn’t have to travel so far) and higher capacities (smaller pits mean more data in the same area).

Double-sided, double-layer disks are possible (DVD-18) but are currently expensive to produce – though DVD mastering techniques (both home burning and commercial production, though these use completely different techniques) are improving all the time. Dual-layer disks used to be much more expensive to produce than they are now – remember the first DVDs you bought where you had to flip the disk over half way through the film? Cheaper mastering techniques were so that Warner Brothers could sell yo that disk for £25 and still make a profit – never mind you had to get out of your seat half way through Goodfellas.

The next format up will be Blu-ray, from the Blu-ray Disk Founders (BDF – including Dell, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, LG, Philips, Pioneer and Sony amongst others). As the name suggests, Blu-ray uses a blue laser to read data. Blue light has a shorter wavelength, so can read smaller pits – and tha means denser data: a dual-layer disk will store 50gb. As the data pattern is s intricate, this makes them more vulnerable to data destroying scratches. The format is currently available in Japan and the USA, but the disks are cartridge based – the next iteration of the format will not use a cartridge as it will have a coating supplied by TDK.

Naturally, the step to the next level will not be that simple: NEC and Toshiba are promoting HD DVD at CeBIT. This new format uses the same optical head as a conventional DVD player, and a dual-layer disk will store 30gb. Look forward to seeing HD DVD burners on the market in 2005.

We hope that backwards compatibility is high on each one of these manufacturers’ lists.

Sony’s domestic Blu-ray recorder

DVD Demystified on the five (no, six! Isn’t it seven?) proposed for high density disks

Coming to a PVR Near You: Hitachi’s 400gb hard Drive

Snappily titled the Deskstar 7K400, the drive is currently under test by equipment manufacturers hoping to use it in their products, and could be incorporated into PVRs late in the year. The 400gb drive is available with a PATA or newer SATA interface and spins at 7200 rpm, pretty much the standard these days. The drive uses 3.5” platters, so won’t be suitable for mobile devices. Currently, the highest capacity 3.5” drive is around 250gb.

Hitachi hopes the drive will give it a bigger role in the consumer electronics market due to the rapid growth of PVRs, hard disk recorders and media hubs in the home. Last year Apple bought 730,000 units of hard disks from Hitachi’s competitor Toshiba, so obviously they’re keen to see some of that business in future.

400gb translates to about 400 hours of broadcast television, or about 45 hours of HDTV. Or nearly a year’s worth of MP3s.

Apple’s hard drive future

New Memory Card Format Aimed at 3G Phones

Motorola will be using a new memory card format in their new phones (the E1000 and A1000, reported here this week), with capacities from 32mb to 512mb. These new cards are about half the size of a SIM, making them slightly smaller than the miniSD format, which was launched less than a year ago.

The cards are intended to be removable so that users can share files or transfer data. The specification for the cards will be open, so other manufacturers will be able to adopt it. No details for performance or electrical characteristics have been released yet.

Chances are then, that your PDA, phone, games console, MP3 player, robot dog and camera will all use entirely different memory cards. If that’s not enough to send you sobbing down to the shops to get a new all-in-one device, then we don’t know what is.

PC World almost seem pleased

TiVo Claim Patent Infringment by EchoStar

PVR pioneer, TiVo, has filed a patent infringement suit against US satellite TV provider, EchoStar. They are claiming that EchoStar are using technology that violates their patent, “multimedia time warping system”, that enables viewers to “store selected television broadcast programs while the user is simultaneously watching or reviewing another program” that they filed for in 1998 and were granted in 2001.

The headline is clear, TiVo start to see the PVR world become accepted by the general public and want to start gaining income from their patents – they have 40 awarded and a further 100 applications pending. It is also in TiVo business plan to increase their income from patents and reduce their reliance on selling boxes.

We wonder if there is another, less immediately obvious, intention. One of TiVo’s largest customers is US satellite TV provider DirecTV, who were recently taken over by Rupert Murdoch and amongst the many companies that Mr Murdoch has as interest in is NDS. NDS market a PVT, the XTV PVR, which could be a major threat to TiVo and their continuing relationship as a supplier to DirecTV – unless DirecTV know legal action would following the changing of suppliers.

EchoStar PVR

NDS XTV PVR

PSX Spec Downgraded but Still Sells Out

Following the recent launch of Sony’s PSX, which combines the functions of a PlayStation 2, PVR and DVD burner (full details), there have been a number of dissenting voices over the reduced specification of the released product. Despite this, the first shipment to shops is reported to have nearly sold out on launch day, with long queues on the day of its release. The size of the initial shipment has not been disclosed. A spokesperson for Sony added that they plan to ship one million PSX systems by the end of 2004.

Quite a number of what would appear to be vital functions and features of the PSX have been downgraded or removed, which Sony say is to time pressures in hitting an xmas released date. The most surprising omission is of a functioning Ethernet port, clearly vital for accessing online content and sharing content between rooms in a household.

A number of formats will not initially be supported. MP3 playback will be missing, but Sony’s copy-protected ATRAC will be and TIFF and GIF graphics formats, although JPEG will continue to be supported. Two disk formats, CD-R and DVD+RW have also been dropped. The speed of the DVD recording has been halved from x24 to x12 which should have too much of an impact.

Financial analysts have been damning in their views of the changes with Kazumasa Kubota of Okasan Securities has described the PSX as a “publicity stunt”, while Kazuya Yamamoto of UFJ Tsubasa has claimed that “lowering the specifications of the PSX hurt Sony’s image”.

We feel the removals have been more about anti-piracy than a need to “rush” the release and are probably victims of the long-running struggle between Sony’s content and CE division.

Sony PSX site

Microsoft to Charge for FAT Filing

Microsoft have announced that they will be introducing a licensing fee for the use of their patented portions of the File Allocation Table (FAT).

The FAT contains the list the filenames, their size and location of files that are held on computer media – essentially the index of the files are stored and is used to retrieve them. The structure was originally developed under Microsoft’s original Disk Operating System (DOS) and then under in Windows, later to be replaced by NT Filing System (NTFS). It has become the dominant standard and as such enables the simple interchange of files between different digital devices, such as transferring digital photos held on a camera using a removable Smart Media or via USB lead to a PC.

Microsoft propose two licensing models; one for removable media, covering the preformatting of the media and media preloaded with content, which could, for example be USB drive keyrings, memory cartridges, etc; the other for manufacturers of certain consumer electronics (CE) devices, which they define as follows

“portable digital still cameras; portable digital video cameras; portable digital still/video cameras; portable digital audio players; portable digital video players; portable digital audio/video players; multifunction printers; electronic photo frames; electronic musical instruments; and standard televisions”.

Charges are planned at US$0.25 per unit with a cap on total royalties of $250,000 per manufacturer.

They are effectively saying, if your consumers want to easily exchange information with computers that run Windows, you need to pay us some money to enable that. This could be because they now acknowledge that not every consumer electronics devices will run Windows and want to ensure that they gain some income from them.

It will be interesting to see how the CE companies respond. Will they grit their teeth and pay Microsoft, or will they collectively decide to use an open source filing system. It is a potentially risky move by Microsoft, and could have the affect of pushing people away from their platform.

Microsoft terms

D-Link announce 1st UPnP standalone home network storage unit

D-Link have released a device, the DSM-602H, that they are call a Storage Media Central Home Drive. We think there are a couple of things about this product that are of note and are a signpost to the future.

Utilising an idea from business computing, where networked hard drive storage is separated from the server – a Storage Area Network (SAN) – this device is just for file storage. It doesn’t perform any other function. It just receives files, holds them and dispatches them on request of the processing machine, be that a Digital Media Adaptor, computer or another device.

While it’s not the first device to do this, the Martian NetDrive has been gathering fans for a while, it’s the first from a major manufacturer. We feel this will be a continuing trend – as consumers digitise and hold greater amounts of media, they will just add storage units to cope. There are two models for this, single standalone units like this the DSM-602H, and units that have a empty drive bays for a number of hard drives to be held.

The other significant development is that this is the first storage device that utilises Universal Plug-n-Play (UPnP). UPnP allows the user to just plug the device into any UPnP-friendly network, and without any manual configuration, it will sort out it’s own IP address, network name, announce its capabilities and make itself available to any other device on the network. UPnP or Apple’s similar Rendezvous are great advances for the home user, removing the unnecessary complexity of setup.

We imagine the only extension that this type of device will require in the future would be an interface to handle the drives contents Digital Rights Management (DRM). Rights holders of content won’t be distributing their products onto home networks that store their content without this.

It is disappointing to see that this first release is only 20Gb, which when put in the perspective of the Apple’s 40Gb iPod, sound pretty feeble. It’s no surprise that D-Link don’t mention storing video.

Available from mid-October at a surprisingly high $249.99, it’s interesting to see it comes with free 24/7 technical support – one of the essential features for Digital Lifestyle products.

Expect plenty more devices like this in the future.

Links: D-Link, Martian NetDrive, Apple Rendezvous & UPnP