I still want my optical storage drives, and believe others will also want an ability to store data in a manner that involves optical storage which is not susceptible to static, and aging electronic components leading to total data loss, and single point of failures.
As far as my computing today, I love SSD's for their speed for games etc, but I store my important data still on spinning platters, and my most important data that I never want to lose on DVD-R storage discs.
If I was forced due to obsolescence to go with flash storage for my most important data for long term storage, I would have to have multiple redundancy of it, and still I would feel like there is too much risk to lose it all due to Read/Write nature of Flash media. The Read-Only of CD-R and DVD-R's adds a level of protection that I enjoy, that a virus etc cant kill the disc, unless one had the ability to activate the laser and double etch the aluminum within the disc to cancel out the data and trash it. None have acted like that yet!
In the past, I have suffered total data losses. I learned through this process to protect myself from total loss by implemention of redundancy, and when optical storage became available and affordable with CD-R's for 650mb and 700mb storage it was a blessing compared to the stacks of about 1500+ floppy disks I had prior, some of them spanned to store larger than 1.44mb files. When I got my first CD-RW drive about 13 years ago. I was so excited when i took my stacks of floppies and squeezed them all onto 4 CD-R's, then able to toss out 90% of the floppies and just keep the purchased software floppies and DOS 5, 6.22 etc sets and Windows 3.11.
I lost a tremendous amount of data in 1995 due to the Michelangelo/Stoned Virus as MSAV detected it. Back then I did not have redundant backups, and important data would remain on a single disk. I ended up infecting many disks before finding out I was infected and each floppy inserted was getting trashed. At the time I was running DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.11 which had MSAV and it detected the virus only because I ran MSAV, I had no antivirus installed to Windows 3.11, nothing monitoring for anything bad, but the damage was done. The point of infection was buying a 386 computer which came with a box of disks at a yard sale for $20 and popping them in 1 by 1 looking for anything interesting on them, sometimes finding games etc on unlabelled disks, sometimes finding business info etc, which I had no interest in and deleted the data to make the disks blank for my use. I then implemented testing and scanning new disks with the 386 16Mhz computer as a quarantine area first before bringing them over to my faster 486DX33Mhz computer, as well as any important data I would make a 2nd copy of and store them in a box seperate from the frequently used disks to limit any future infection spreads. As soon as I got Windows 95 and AOL 3.0 in 1996, I installed Norton Utilities 2.0 with a background scanner. This protected me many times from infected files that I found for download of FreeWare & Shareware.
"As personal cloud services become ubiquitous and broadband speeds increase, there's very little reason for many consumers to use an optical drive on their computer going forward," Gartenberg said.
Here is an area that I have a BIG problem with. I have very little trust in Cloud Storage Services as for its out on the cloud "somewhere", likely stored on multiple servers for redundancy to make your data safe from loss. BUT who can look at your data, who can steal your data, who can alter your data, and use your data in a manner to profile you based on the type of data is stored there. I am even more concerned over the FREE storage clouds more than the subscription ones. Companies are always evolving and while you may have agreed to terms and conditions initially that looked like a great idea, down the road they might change their terms and conditions and not necessarily have to notify you on this as for the initial agreement that you agreed to clearly stated, "* Terms and Conditions Subject to Change at Anytime. Also if the terms changed and you are no longer in acceptance to your data being stored there and want to remove your data, to your perception of the storage area it might look like the data is gone, but how do you know that the cloud storage provider is not shadow copying this data or keeping its own long term storage of this data offline for legal liability reasons. As well as what if they are sloppy in an upgrade process and ship out a blade servers bank of drives without scrubbing them first. Now your data is no longer in their control as for its usually sold to other companies who recycle the hardware to put it back into operation or parts it out and make a profit, or it goes to the local dump, or it gets sent back to the equipment manufacturer through a recycle agreement and is shipped to China or some other country where in any of these situations listed the drives are just waiting for someone with shady intentions to search the drives for anything good and to make money on it on the black market. Next thing you know your data was stolen, ( your Identity, your Money, your credit History... since they opened up loans in your name and ran off with the money leaving you holding the bag, your Inventions, Source Code, and any endless number of things that are important to you or your company that has data stored there.)
Also to mention that they state that Sony is pulling out of Optical storage ... Sony who lead us into Optical storage, is just 1 company of many that makes Optical storage drives. Sony pulling out just makes other smaller companies thrive.
Grimmest Home Computer Future:
Eventually we all have Thin Clients that boot through Microsoft.com's World PXE Service, Connected to the Cloud for storage, "these computers have to be online to function and are useless offline and are so proprietary and well protected that they cant be jail broken to run stand alone offline", computer useage is then taxed like gasoline on the selling ploy that it will reverse the national debt in the USA as well as assist other countries in taxable revenues.
Myself in this situation:
This old guy playing on old offline computers, part of a group of computer hobbyists, possibly connected to our own Open-Source network protocol sort of like a BBS before Internet, and having a blast.
I like the Internet, but I also like the Protection of Isolation!
