Storage devices, last innovations

 The market is in permanent competition and all the companies are always trying to be at the leading edge. The use of CD format, created in 1979, already supplanted the floppy-disc format for some time. The more common CD-ROM format can store 80minutes/700 MB.

Then the DVD format has become very popular, this is able to store much more data, in the more common single layer DVD you can store 4,7 GB, but  double level double layer DVD can store 17 GB.

Another very useful device is USB pen-drive, that now are largely spread worldwide. This kind of device has a very variable storage capacity, now USB pen-drive can store even 16GB but there are also some that can store 128 Gb. On the market you can find pen drive with a lot of shapes and colors, they are less  cumbersome than CD disc and they work faster in the data transfer process.

The latest news on storage devices is the creation of a new  kind of DVD, called high definition DVD (HD DVD) but especially of their direct competitor, Blu-ray disc or BD.

These two new formats guarantee to make video and audio quality more and more defined and detailed, to make the public live an even more realistic experience.

BD has a superior storage capacity. Thanks to a blue-colored laser, it is able to store up to 54 GB data, almost 12 times more than simple single layer DVD. This capacity seems huge, but discs encoded in MPEG-2 video typically limit content producers to around two hours of high-definition content on a single-layer BD-ROM. This required the creation of double layer discs (more than 50GB), but also new more sophisticated codec, such as MPEG-4.

In July 2008, have also been announced 400GB 16 layers Blu-ray discs, but they haven’t been commercialized yet.

Today the fight has surely been won by BD, because in February 2008, Toshiba, owner of the rights on opponent format, announced that it would no longer develop, manufacture, or market HD DVD players and recorders, effectively ending the format war.

Sony's PlayStation 3 acted as a catalyst for Blu-ray Disc, as the PlayStation 3 used a Blu-ray Disc drive as its primary information storage medium, without the console, consumers should buy a specific BD player and probably also a new TV screen  that works in high definition to be able to see this kind of discs.

This is no doubts an obstacle for the mass spreading of this new technology, at least for the first years.

Although every movie production company already announced that they support the BD format and they already started releasing film using this format.

 A big doubt about this format is if it will be able to keep production costs low and so to keep also selling prices low for final consumers.

Until now it seems that discs’ costs will be more or less the same than usual DVD. The real problem is that until now selling of BD players are much more lower than expected. This is because consumers think that common DVD quality is already good enough,  the price of BD players is still too high and consumers don’t perceive so overwhelming improvements in the video or audio quality to justify the purchase of this new device. And until now nobody can say they are wrong.