Submitted by Daveyb003 t3_11w6v5u in Futurology
I think that physical media will make a comeback at some point. But then then I wonder if internet speeds will increase so much that compression won’t be a thing. Like perfect 8k picture.
Comments
Onrawi t1_jcwqkt7 wrote
Regarding optical media, yeah, probably. Removable media will continue to move to the SD-Card/Flash Drive route until something comes along to disrupt flash media.
ArOnodrim t1_jcwx9qp wrote
With SD cards the capacity of hard drives 10 years ago, there is no other physical media that makes any sense anymore.
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jgzman t1_jd0b0bl wrote
With SD cards the size of your smallest fingernail, another physical media is needed. Maybe one of those credit-card sized things they use to store phone chips on.
riceandcashews t1_jd0g0og wrote
A usb stick is a thing that exists
Jaker788 t1_jd17ibd wrote
Optical media is still cheaper and simpler to manufacture though. Blu rays max out right now at 128gb with BDXL triple layer, no copper or silicon or crazy expensive photolithography machines. 128gb of flash is still a higher material and product cost and will for some time.
Onrawi t1_jd1cg2e wrote
Sure, I just don't think we'll see a successor to Blu-Ray optical media. It's cheaper to produce for now but even triple layer is getting pretty close to thumb drives at 128GB, with SD Cards being about twice as expensive, give or take. In order for another standard to win it has to have a reason to hit mass production at scale, and it was tough for a lot of people to swallow the cost of Blu Ray when it was new with streaming services biting into its biggest market. Honestly if it weren't for video games and some archival media Blu Ray would be limited to cinephiles and users in low internet service areas already.
Sea_Cattle_8785 t1_jcwrsxh wrote
Yeah I think there are many research with huge potential, it could be crystals or light or holographic media, some are even researching dna data storage
mnemonicer22 t1_jcxfcgl wrote
I still buy physical media bc I don't like license rights in digital media. You own nothing you buy digitally. It's all under pretty limited license rights and I've seen companies/products like borders or zune go out of business and take your content with them.
The shift from Google music to yt music shredded my music collection (but backups) and Amazon's shift to a Spotify clone has played merry hob with my library bc the license rights changed.
Having a physical copy you can fall back in is the hedge against these risks.
noxav t1_jcxp54w wrote
> Having a physical copy you can fall back in is the hedge against these risks.
The way I see it; it's not about digital versus physical. It's digital vs piracy.
If something I bought digitally is taken away from me, there are ways for me to take it back by force if necessary. Corporations need to understand that they are not fighting piracy, they are competing with it.
Tindola t1_jcwrfx0 wrote
I think once we move to holographic media, then there will be the real need for physical media again
ArOnodrim t1_jcwxbqq wrote
It will be on a 27TB SD card.
Sirisian t1_jcx8zsd wrote
In a very highly compressed form that might be enough, but "8K" 240Hz lightfield video with say a 1 meter camera sphere is so much data. That's with a restricted FOV. For 360 lightfield it's an absurd amount of data. The file size might end up being larger especially for films with a lot of action or VFX that can't be compressed easily as they're very dynamic. I foresee this utilizing very low latency streaming and predictive algorithms. (Analyzing how the audience watches with eye tracking to best compress scenes might also be required).
ArOnodrim t1_jcwx3v9 wrote
SD cards are the final form of physical media. They are a size and density that it can hold anything you could possibly want. They are portable hard drives in the size of a postage stamp. 8k media is going to be useless with the ability of the human eye being exceeded if you are more than a few feet away from the screen.
Itchy_Education t1_jcydk8s wrote
>tvpworld.com/685855...
AFAIK blu ray discs are dirt cheap to manufacture, and dirt cheaper than SD cards
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nuclearbananana t1_jcx9018 wrote
I'm not sure being the size of postage stamp is a good idea. Too easy to lose and not enough branding opportunities.
ArOnodrim t1_jcx99y3 wrote
Easy to lose means repeat customers.
Itchy_Education t1_jcye0h8 wrote
No reason the card has to be so small, they could make a medium-sized cartridge for movies, games, as long as the contact points are the same. Read speeds are higher than with disc too
Sartres_Roommate t1_jcxfb5d wrote
Same is true for 4k. Unless you are pressed to the screen, you cannot see a difference in resolution.
.....yes, you can see the difference in color gamut on your your 4k discs but not the resolution on an 80" inch TV while sitting at the proper viewing difference.
ArOnodrim t1_jcxffiv wrote
Yeah, it's a waste of bandwidth.
briansabeans t1_jcyawb1 wrote
If you are a gamer, you know this is not true. 4K games look WAY better even with all other settings kept the same.
Dudecalion t1_jcyzfmg wrote
I imagine, as our data needs become larger, something like crystal will become the norm. 4k TV might be the norm now but some day holographic TV or similar may exist.
AwesomeDragon97 t1_jcza8q7 wrote
That article conveniently leaves out critical information like the read and write speeds, as well as the resistance to being dropped.
Mash_man710 t1_jcx5skn wrote
There will never be portable media again because it costs money to produce and distribute. Streaming services are far cheaper to distribute and bandwidth will continue to improve.
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bojun t1_jcxq3ig wrote
I don't get the question. All data, even if remote to us, is stored on or backed up on physical media.
whotheff t1_jcyap4u wrote
- Flash storage is a thing - Boot drive, gaming drive, SD card or anything
- Optical drives will probably survive if they pack some insane amount of storage space in a small form factor. Whatever they do, they will be too slow and only good for deep archiving.
- Mechanical HDDs will linger a few more years and then completely die, unless some niche appears, where they are better. Alternatively, some insane new technology might speed them up (but not very likely).
- Tape drives will outlive all of us :D They are still alive and developing.
There is a huge difference between home use and pro use. Home use will go completely in the cloud, while pro will remain on local storage. There will be a totally distributed network of computers, holding random bits of data, but it's too hard to predict what shape or use it will take. I suspect it will take a tiered approach, where fastest and most accesed data will be on flash, while least accessed data will be on tape or some future version of Blu-Ray.
Also, keep in mind that the definition of a true "backup" says that storing same data on at least two different physical locations, stored on two technologically different medias is considered as backed up.
riceandcashews t1_jd0iadt wrote
Hdd is still used as slow cheap storage. If ssds actually get as cheap as hdds then yeah they'll go extinct
whotheff t1_jd281cf wrote
Currently, cheapest 4 TB HDD is 51 USD (HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 HUS724040ALS640 (0B26885) 4TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SAS 6Gb/s).
This roughly means 1 TB of HDD costs ~13USD.
While a 4TB SSD is 200 USD ( Crucial P3 4TB PCIe 3.0 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD, up to 3500MB/s - CT4000P3SSD8 ).
This means 1 TB of SSD costs 50 USD.
Yes, these are the cheapest options and probably not with the best performance, but still comparison is interesting.I predict In 2-3 years that price difference will be cut in half. Meaning, an SSD will be only 2 times more expensive than a HDD.
TheBigLabrewski t1_jcwpzsu wrote
Something something quantum something mirrors something graphene storage as a service.
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MaxwellzDaemon t1_jcx5yz1 wrote
BluRay seems to be disappearing. Try finding a new computer with a BluRay writer installed - it's nearly impossible. I've gone through two or three external BluRay writers - all of them stopped working within a short time.
nuclearbananana t1_jcx973s wrote
> But then then I wonder if internet speeds will increase so much that compression won’t be a thing. Like perfect 8k picture.
Compression will likely always be a thing. I think you mean lossy compression, which actually removes information to make something smaller.
But there's also lossless compression, which simply removes redundancies in data and doesn't lose anything. It's (almost) free storage, just some overhead in decoding. That's not likely to go away.
Utxi4m t1_jcxi2rf wrote
Books will be around for a while yet..
Apart from that, I imagine we'll get some sort of high capacity medium that can store data indefinitely for extraordinarily important data, which probably won't be available to ordinary people...
Evipicc t1_jcxq7yw wrote
Nope, we'll have NAND media like the Switch game SSD's. You'll have a miniaturized case just like the switch and a tiny little pinprick of a NAND data device with a movie on it. As long as there are old people there will be physical media.
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LocksmithLeast9539 t1_jcycxat wrote
Holograms. Am I the only one that’s expecting holograms? 3 dimensional hologramic entertainment? Relatively soon, I’d say.
riceandcashews t1_jd0fw5a wrote
USB stick is improved physical media over blu ray. Physical media will probably never come back. Unless you count the ssds that you store your data on
green_meklar t1_jd1zk0q wrote
I recall hearing about some research a few years ago into 3D data storage based on quartz crystals. They were able to get an extremely high information density, hundreds of terabytes on an object you can fit in your hand. Also, the medium is extremely durable; you could bury it in the ground and the data would remain perfectly readable for billions of years. The equipment for writing and reading the data (and creating sufficiently precise crystals) is still pretty rare and expensive, but the proof-of-concept suggests that it could make its way into widespread use someday.
No-Owl9201 t1_jcx3xik wrote
I'm guessing that whatever way they can extend smart phone storage with will be the future.
perrinoia t1_jcyatdu wrote
Trans flash, aka micro sd, will be the last holdout used by game consoles unless someone invents a USBC flash drive that is smaller.
Otherwise, everything will be cloud based, and the only use we'll have for physical media will be security keys and download links.
AwesomeDragon97 t1_jczagvb wrote
The cloud is not a magical place in the sky, it is just someone else’s computer. This means that physical media will never be obsolete because the data always needs to be stored somewhere.
perrinoia t1_jczdqun wrote
Semantics. Obviously OP meant removable media. There's no need to physically carry media around with us like we used to.
Look at the popularity of chrome books, for instance.
The last time I built a computer, I bought the biggest hard drive I could to fit all of my games and other data. However, my current cellphone is more powerful than the last gaming rig I built. SSDs are so much faster than HDDs, and the internet is so much faster, I don't need to store everything I own locally. I can use my internal storage as a buffer to store whatever I'm actively working on or playing with, while archiving the rest on the cloud and downloading as needed.
phine-phurniture t1_jcws3hx wrote
I suspect the big players want there to be no portable media so you are forced to either use the cloud or buy media like apple store music....
Master Switch is a great book that tries to remind us that the big players in media want our eyeballs back watching their narrative .... advertisements..