by Thomas Bachand, ©2002-2005
Like all computer technology, sooner rather than later the CD will fall from grace and be replaced by the next best thing. Depending on who you talk to, CD's have a life between five and fifteen years. How long your CD's last will depend upon a number of factors, including how often they are used, the quality of the disk (a gold surface is best), how they are stored (the plastic breaks down), and the quality of the burner (some introduce more errors than others). With fifty-megabyte image files becoming the submission standard and scanners producing higher resolution files every generation, 700 MB disks don't go far. Next you'll need shelf space to hold all these disks. Then, of course, you'll have to have a system for locating images and disks. And, since the most affordable CD's are write only, every time you change a file you'll need to burn a new disk. The CD is not an ideal long-term storage solution.
Neither will the DVD. DVD's presently share all the drawbacks of CD's plus a few more. At the top of the list is the lack of a standard. DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM - the standard you choose may go obsolete next week. In fact, despite a capacity of 17 GB, the best DVD writer is only able to write 9 GB per disk. Regardless, at some point, DVD or CD, you will be faced with the task of copying your disks, one by one, over to the new medium. You'll wish you had bought a carrousel, but of course, no one will be making them at that point and you'll be pirating parts to get the dusty one you have, up and running. It is not pretty picture.
Fortunately, there is a rosier scenario. Over the past few years hard drive technology has advance to the point where it is faster, more reliable, and cheaper than ever. Drives are so cheap, in fact, that some are less expensive, per GB, than CD's. Of course, hard drives are faster, read-write, the files are accessible in real time, and, with capacities of more than 100 GB and greater commonplace, more space efficient. Just as with your CD's, the drive will fail at some point. While most disk failures will be repairable with a disk utility, a back-up drive will insure that none of your data gets lost. All data should be written to two drives at any one time.
By the time the warranties on your drives expire the technology will once again be faster, bigger, and cheaper. Drive technology has been doubling every year and only recently began slowing to a mere 60% annually. As manufacturers can't afford a loss rate greater than 3% and warranties are calculated with the drive constantly running, most drives easily survive the warranty period. Upgrading a drive is as simple as attaching the new drive, initializing the disk, and copying your data across.
As I mentioned in the last issue, USB drives are among the most versatile, mainly because of their small size and the universality of USB on today's computers. USB was designed for attaching keyboards, joysticks, and other low-bandwidth devices, so the transfer rates over USB1 connections are pokey at best (1 MB/sec). New to the field is USB2 which boosts the speed to 8 to 12 MB/sec. As of this writing USB2 is only available on Windows. Hopefully by the time you read this Apple will have changed that.
A step above USB is Firewire 1394A, which has transfer rates of 12 to 16 MB/sec. I tested the Maxtor 3000XT, which boasts a capacity of 160 MB. The speed boost over USB was welcome. This drive has a very small foot print and is easily expanded. Additional drives can be added, daisy-chained one to the next - up to 62 in all. My tests on this drive came up error free - under OSX. Under OS 9 copying errors were routine. For those wanting more speed, Firewire 1394B, also set for a summer release, will offer a 400% boost. This will elevate Firewire speeds to the level of SCSI and ATA.
To push the limits of drive technology I also tested Maxtor's Atlas 10K III. This SCSI drive offers phenomenal transfer rates of 40 MB/sec. Drives of this caliber are primarily designed for web servers running 24 hours a day. For those doing data intensive production which requires frequent drive access (like high-end image editing), improved save times and virtual memory access are significant. The newer ATA and SCSI drives set to come out later this year will offer transfer rates of 50 MB/sec.
As my older Mac was running an outdated flavor of SCSI, to see the speed gains offered by the Atlas 10K III, I turned to an expansion card to upgrade my computer to Ultra 160 protocol. Installation was straightforward. For years Apple has designed their machines for easy access and expansion. While a bottleneck somewhere in my system prevented me from seeing the full benefits of the Atlas, overall performance was above the Firewire drive. As with the Firewire drive, OSX proved a better platform. In OS 9 the Atlas would not be recognized on cold boot and required a restart to be visible on the desktop. My unverified conclusion is that the drivers for either the hard drives or the expansion cards are not completely compatible with Mac OS. While Apple does a great job of getting manufacturers to standardize software and such, third party hardware integration has always been less than ideal. The market simply is not there. Evenso, for those not ready to spring for the latest computer technology, expansion cards offer an affordable means to keep an older machine competitive. For most tasks, an older processor is plenty fast.
Thomas Bachand consults on digital imaging issues and can be reached at 510.547.8622 or found on the Internet at http://www.thomasbachand.com.