Thanks for the Memory

Hello again. Sorry for the delay in posting this article, however I'm in a sort of a transition period in my life, and that can occasionally make it difficult to keep up with my other activities. Hopefully in the near future I'll have more time on my hands in which to write to you all, and hopefully expand my horizons somewhat.

At any rate, on with today's article. I'm not saying goodbye, so don't worry. Actually I'm referring to the growing trend of common data storage in everyday devices. So let's get on with it.

I'm not sure if you've seen the growing number of Personal TV devices on the market today, such as TiVO and some newer versions of the Dish Network and DirecTV services, however many of them involve an on-board hard drive used in storing recorded media.

This type of storage format is growing more popular amongst consumers, however there is one shortcoming which has held back the advance of this technology: Portability.

It's one thing to be able to record your favorite TV shows or movies and then watch them again at your leisure, however it's another thing to be able to carry those shows to another room in the house and easily view them again. The reason that VCRs and the VHS format became so popular was the ease of recording and transporting your information from one place to another. The storage format was inexpensive, and the equipment needed to play the tapes back was readily available.

This is one of the problems that has plagued the DVD movement until recently, because it took so long for the various manufacturers to get through to the general public that there were other features in a DVD player that made one worth having, despite the inability to record to the format. Even so we have been promised that, sometime in the future, we will be able to record to the DVD format, or a close cousin of it.

So what are technology manufacturers going to do about this in the near future? Well, if you own a digital camera or MP3 player you may well be looking at the future of portable media storage. While the largest affordable flash or SmartMedia cards are only around 64MB, that's a far leap ahead of where we were this time last year. Considering the fact that MP3 music can be stored in near CD quality at the rate of 1.2MB per minute of audio, it is conceivable that in the near future you may be able to record an entire movie on a card the size of half a credit card, all for around $20-$50 per card.

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