I was flipping through the last 30 years of digital media outlined in Spectrum’s Death of Digital Media when it occurred to me that a day may come when not every nano-enabled memory development will be measured against an iPod.
The latest development by researchers in Glasgow foretells of iPod’s that will be able to hold 300 million tunes. I have about 10,000 tunes on my iPod and probably listen to about half of them. My mind boggles at having that many songs and worse yet transferring them on to my iPod.
No, it seems unlikely that an iPod with that storage capacity would be of any use. But instead of concerning ourselves over how many songs a nano-enabled memory could store on an iPod over at TNTLog it is suggested that we may want to start asking, “What could cheap mass storage enable?”
Good question.
Comments (2)
Perhaps another measure would be the number of full length HD movies that could be stored on an iPod-like device.
Posted by Herbert Goronkin | April 24, 2008 4:37 PM
Posted on April 24, 2008 16:37
Being able to store 300 million tunes may not be that useful in an iPod, but being able to store several gigabytes of data on a solid-state disk drive is. Think about it, data access on a memory chip is done in constant time, while the time it takes for data access on an electro-mechanical disk drive varies. This variance is dependent on a number of factors such as seek time, how many RPM the disk is spinning, and the physical location of the data on the disk. These are not an issue for a solid-state disk. However, the capacity of many solid-state disks is generally poor, and the cost to buy one is too high for the average consumer. However, as the capacity and speed of these nano-enabled memory increases, and the cost decreases, perhaps solid-state disk drives, based on this technology, will become more readily available. Imagine having a hard drive that has virtually no seek time delays, and having possibly faster data transfer rates than existing electro-mechanical disk drives! One of the bottlenecks for many computer applications is disk IO, if the data may be retrieved faster, then our applications will load and run faster. This is just something to think about.
Posted by John Triplett | April 25, 2008 9:20 AM
Posted on April 25, 2008 09:20