Legends of the Sun Pig

In the article Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years–What Does That Mean for You?, Dr. Joseph Mercola talks about the prospects of having hard drives big enough to fit an entire lifetime’s worth of documents, books, photos, music and video. (Via The Shifted Librarian)

Great idea, but after last year’s Dead Disk Incident I don’t even trust current hard disk technology to keep my personal data safe. What was it Mr Scott said on Star Trek III? “The more they overtake the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.” I worry that smaller, finer, nano-scale components means that there’s more chance of something breaking. If a petabyte disk can detect magnetic fields a thousand times weaker than current drive technology, does that mean that the disk is a thousand times more susceptible to magnetic interference or other disruptive effects? How long do the magnetic regions (i.e. your data) remain stable before they decay and blur into a uniform, blank slate?

I think it’s useless to harp on about all the wonders this kind of storage technology will bring, without also wondering about the dangers of committing our entire lives to purely digital media. The main danger lies on having so much valuable data (remember: we may be talking here about all of the photographs you’ve ever taken, all of the emails you’ve ever sent or received) in one place. Bad idea. Really bad. It’s not a question of whether your hard drive will fail, it’s a question of when.

If you have any kind of attachment to your data at all, you ought to have backups. But backing up a petabyte drive (1,000,000 GB) onto DVDs (4.5GB capacity, or even 27GB with future Blu-ray technology) is the equivalent of backing up a 50GB drive to floppy disks. Even moving it all over a Gigabit ethernet connection to a remote server would take about three months.

Personally, I’d much rather see some big advances in data reliability engineering, or in personal backup solutions. Entrusting your precious data to a single hard disk without backup is like driving a car without a seatbelt. Don’t risk what you can’t afford to lose.

When I saw the news that Microsoft had bought Virtual PC from Connectix (via Sean Campbell and Andrew Swigart), my first thought was, “Wow–that’s different”. My second thought was, “What’s going to happen to the Connectix staff?” My brother-in-law works on VPC at Connectix, you see. (Further reading indicates that a lot of them will become Microsoft employees, reporting in to Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit.)

My third thought was, “Why?” This is the hot topic of the moment. Myself, I think that this has a lot to do with Linux, and selling Microsoft server OSs into the enterprise. It allows MS to go relax their stance on Linux without necessarily endangering license sales. (Not that they will change their position–just that they now can.)

Here’s the way it works: an MS client is tempted by Linux. MS can now say, “Go ahead and run it as a virtual machine. You can use whatever Linux apps you want, but at the same time you keep all the benefits of having the main server itself running Windows.” Or, to a sales target they want to convert from Linux/Unix to Windows: “You don’t have to port all your mission-critical apps over to Windows in a big bang. Just put in the new servers with Windows running on them, and let the virtual machines carry on running them until the native Windows versions are ready.” Either way, they win, because they can treat Linux as a third-party application instead of an operating system.

I also reckon they’ll gradually ease VPC away from the (Windows) desktop, and sell it primarily as a server product. VPC for the Mac will probably remain as a desktop product. Why? Because whether you use a Mac or a PC, a home user is likely to want to buy only one license for Windows. If MS promote VPC for the Mac, they gain license sales. If they promote it for Windows, they’ll be encouraging people to re-use their existing Windows license keys, and that’s a big no-no.

Interesting move, that’s for sure.

I still haven’t upgraded my PC yet, but
looking at the way memory prices are going (see graph below–the vertical axis show the cost of 512MB in GBP), I don’t feel in too much of a hurry.

I can get 1GB of memory now for the same price 512MB would have cost at the start of December. Nice.