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The Chicago Tribune Eric Gwinn Gadget Adviser Column: Removable Media Formats Shrink and Capacity Balloons

Posted on: Tuesday, 17 January 2006, 12:00 CST

By Eric Gwinn, Chicago Tribune

Jan. 17--In the old days of home computing, we stored our recipes and the Next Great American Novel on floppy disks (and before that, audio cassettes).

Now that we have thousands of 4 megabyte song files and hundreds of digital photos, the floppy is as useful as a handkerchief in a hailstorm. Thankfully, storage options are becoming bigger and more numerous -- not to mention smaller. This year, owners of digital cameras and mobile phones will see 8 gigabyte SD cards (which are a bit bigger than a postage stamp). Eventually, we'll have Blu-Ray writable disks, which look like DVDs but hold 10 times more data -- enough for a high-definition movie.

One day, we may get rid of disks and cards altogether and set up safe-deposit boxes on the Internet. This week, Streamload.com began offering 25 gigabytes of free storage. Storage questions will come down to one question, says Lee Williams, a vice president of Iomega Corp., maker of the Zip disk: "Can I -- through my mobile phone or in my home or at the office -- have seamless access to virtual storage and store anything I want on there and easily share it? That's what we want. The innovations are going to come in software and integrated services by end of decade."

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Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune

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Source: Chicago Tribune

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