Not A Blog™

[This entry was originally published on February 21, 2006.]



The demand has always existed for the ability to store a greater amount of data in a smaller space. As one acquires the ability to store more information, it seems that more information makes itself available to be stored. In the minds of many people today, there is simply no reason to throw away perfectly good information: the continuous audio and video recording of your life, a comprehensive translator with unabridged dictionaries for 1,475 languages, the complete data of every United States census since its inception in 1790. After all, one never knows when one will need to know the average income of haberdashers circa 1873. Better to just have the information on hand.

Now, with the increased density and size reduction of storage media, all this information and more can be kept on your person at all times. In the early days of portable information, the increasing density and shrinking size of storage media was hailed as one of the most positive advancements in the computer industry. But today, many people are beginning to question whether or not the small size of their drives is actually a curse.

Despite the enormous amount of storage space on individual hard drives, a significant number of people continue to use removable storage. Dr. Thaddeus Feinbaum, researcher at the Institute for Sociotechnological studies at Syracuse University, recalls the way removable storage used to be handled. “At the turn of the century, most media was stored on large platters. They held just a fraction of what we could store in the same sized space today, but they were much larger.” He also points out, “as portable media increased in capacity, more people started to take their data with them, rather than leave it in the computer where it couldn’t be accessed while away from the machine.”

Yet, not everyone is pleased with today’s shrinking media. Martin Ortega is a professional with no office. He travels the world, meeting with business executives to strike deals for the company he owns and operates, Integrated Data Systems and Integration. Due to the amount of travel he does every year, he takes as much as he can with him, including a series of removable drives.

“They’re great. They hold everything I need to manage IDSI. The only problem is that each one is the size of a small fingernail. I’ve got so much crap on most of them that there’s no way I know what is where. I’ve got to plug in four or five of them until I find what I’m looking for, and that’s an enormous waste of time.”

Modern storage devices have become so small that they are nearly impossible to label. In the past, a quick series of words scribbled on the storage itself would exactly describe its contents. Now most people have no way of knowing what sort of information they actually do carry.

A few have turned this problem into a niche market. Hyun Xi Jian is—like generations of his family before him—a professional miniature transcriber. In his native China, he is renowned for being able to take lengthy passages and copy them onto grains of rice. “The tiny writing has always been in our family,” he said. “My grandfather passed on secrets to me when I was young, but I did not want to [learn]. I thought writing would go away by the time I was his age. Everything would be on computers. Now I am glad I followed him. Those who use such computers need my help more than ever. And I have been fortunate to update such a noble art to the modern day.”

Xi Jian now runs his own miniature transcription business. For a fee, he will take any message you need and write it on the front of your fingernail-sized drives. He makes it possible to once again list an entire drive’s contents on the outside of the drive itself.

Others have taken a more practical approach. A number of companies have begun manufacturing their highest density drives in a larger size—effectively reversing the trend which has been the norm for the past few decades.

“The demand is definitely out there,” said Mark Winn, Operations Manager for Plexum Data Storage. At one point, Plexum manufactured the smallest removable drive on the market, a high density device roughly the size of a sesame seed. It even had a built in wireless interface. Simply sitting it on the desk next to the computer was all that was required for reading or writing to the drive. Nevertheless, it flopped. “It was kind of novel, for a while,” Winn admitted. “But people kept losing it. You’d spy a crumb on the floor and immediately think, ‘wait, is that my drive?’ It was driving people nuts.”

Plexum responded to this by manufacturing the same drive—now the size of a slice of bread. “Again, there’s a certain amount of novelty to it,” said Winn. “People can’t believe how huge the thing is. But even after hefting it around, they realize that the size has inherent value. Its wide, flat sides can store information of its own. Information that you record yourself, and that you can read at a glance, without a computer at all.”

These new, larger storage devices seem to be the new trend for the future. Already a number of companies have begun releasing similar versions of Plexum’s drive. One company has brought a lawsuit against Plexum, claiming it holds a patent on the development of “expansive blank areas on storage devices to facilitate the recording of metadata by humans.” Plexum promises to fight the claim.

Dr. Feinbaum looks further ahead, and sees the day when people will have no reason to leave their homes at all. “When everything can be done remotely or virtually, people will begin to spend more and more time at home. We will no longer need to take data with us.” Feinbaum envisions massive machines, thousands of times the size of a regular computer, which will sit in the houses of those who have no reason to leave. “I can see a single device, the size of a large book, filled with as many crumb-sized drives as you can imagine. The amount of storage would be effectively limitless and no one would again have to worry about carrying their life around on tiny devices—or, for that matter, trying to describe their contents on the drive itself.”