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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1999 Memories too dear to bear ALL the devices I now wear or carry, apart from my laptop, are plagued by lack of memory. My mobile phone, pager, PDA, health monitor and digital camera sport memory capacities of under eight megabytes. In the realm of the PC, memory now costs 2p per megabyte and is falling fast. But for solid state devices we have to pay a hundred times more at £2.20/Mb, with the cost falling far more slowly. Looking at the fundamental physics of electronic storage it is easy to see why there is such a vast price difference, and why it may continue for some significant time. The old 3.5in/1.5-2Mb floppy disc has been around since 1981, and is now archaic and of little use for anything other than the most meagre of text files. It is also expensive and physically immense compared with most portable devices. For example, my double height PCMCIA disc drive realises a one-gigabyte capacity in the same physical volume at 25p/Mb. Physically, of course, it remains far too big for most portables. CDs and DVDs are much cheaper and have ample capacity for most applications, but they are even bigger than the floppy. Flash memory is the common currency of the portable regime today. It is about the right size, and at up to 40Mb has almost enough capacity. But at £3/Mb it is very expensive. Also, most flash memory units look as if they should be handled only in clean room conditions, they are so fragile. So, like many others I find myself lugging a laptop everywhere because it serves the dual purpose of being my portable office and data cache. I continually dump the contents of my portable devices into the 8Gb hard drive because my portables lack the necessary capacity. In an ideal world, my camera would have enough memory to record all the pictures I snap without the need ever to delete anything, my mobile phone would contain a global directory for everyone, and so would my PDA. Alternatively, their network connections would be so reliable and universal that they would require no memory at all. Well, the world is always far from ideal, and a hybrid of these two looks more likely, and even desirable. For the immediate future the race for tiny, cheap memory devices has two key contenders: microdrives and solid state sticks. The microdrive is no more than a miniature hard drive of about 350Mb in an approximate 25x25x3mm volume, realising £1/Mb. This is actually an amazing piece of electromechanical engineering that could revolutionise the portables market, especially if the production price drops by an order of magnitude. Compact solid sticks on the other hand are constructed from chips - flash memory technology - embedded in a chewing-gum-size stick. It looks as though they will offer 40Mb at £5/Mb. I suppose someone will also come up with the micro-floppy/Jazz drive at a suitable frame size and at an intermediate cost. But what is actually required is a breakthrough in memory technology and not an incremental step in the old. Holographic memories may be our best hope. In principal they could record every movie we ever see in something the size of a sugar cube. But until they become a reality I suspect I will continue to carry my laptop, PCMCIA disc, and a modem. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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