Technology doesn’t always evolve in a balanced way

I’m using computers starting 1994. I own mine in 1995 (31 december, what a day). I grew up with modern era computers (386 and 486 PC models) and I’ve realised, like many others, that technology doesn’t evolve in balanced way. Today’s microprocessors are a few thousand times more powerful than the ones 10 years ago, but hard drives aren’t: I now transfer with 60-70MB/s constantly, just a dozen times faster than the 1-2 MB/s I got from my first 610 MB Western Digital drive.

Imagine in this context how a modern CPU is held down when it needs data stored on a turtle slow HDD. Things are moving tough in the right direction, with SSD becoming more and more affordable. The ancient floppy disk was replaced by USB and external drives.

My recent deja-vu with old problems

I’ve switched from Picasa to Flickr so naturaly I’ve started getting the pictures from one place to another. As Picasa doesn’t have an open API I had to get my old DVD disks, copy them to my system and then upload them one folder at a time.

The ‘operation’ begun, everything went perfect with the first few DVDs, but I got to one that blocked the copy. I ejected the disk, cleaned it and did try again. No luck. I went to google for programs that try and recover bad files from scratched DVDs. I was optimistic as the disk wasn’t that scratched and I had worse disks that copy fine.

… After 3 days of using various programs for file copy/recovery I just gave up. What is lost is lost (I still got the small resolution files from Picasa), but I cannot stop and wonder why on earth none of my optical drives managed to copy from a CD that’s not too badly scratched.

Also why programs used for copying files still freeze if they find a file that’s unreadable. I’ve also used programs that skip through bad files but they were so bad that after 10 hours they’re read 7 files and skipped only 2.

There are problems I’ve had with optical media since I’ve started using CDs. None of them lasted 10 year (projected life of recordable disks) and I bet a stamped disk (mass-produced) won’t last 100 years.

The future?

Imagine you’re using 6-7 years from now the optical standard of that time, a disk that can store all your multimedia collections, all your work and programs in a multi terabytes space. What it you get a perpendicular scratch that affects all tracks (worst case, but highly possible). You loose everything. I’ve lost a few hundred megabytes of pictures thanks to a few surface scratches (disks were stored, not lended or exposed to dust/sun). What if it was something more important?

I don’t know about you but I don’t plan on using optical disks for storage in the future.