Blogtrek

CD Pollution

The ability to store and process data has grown tremendously in the last 15 years. In 1988 a typical computer had about 20 MB of disk space. Today's computers have 20 GB - that's a thousand times more. However, our ability to efficiently store the data on appropriate media has not kept pace very well. In fact it has become distorted so badly that it threatens the environment. In the old days, you stored your data on a 360,000 byte 5.25-in floppy disk. Then came the 3.5-in disk which can hold 1,440,000 bytes. The hard disk came next with 20,000,000 bytes of data. If you wanted to take some data somewhere in 1994, you would have used 3.5-in floppy disks. In 1995 or so came the Iomega Zip disk™. All at once 100,000,000 bytes were available on a disk only slightly thicker than a floppy! But what happened to about 10,000,000 bytes, or 10 MB? There was nothing convenient to put it on. If your data was 1.45 MB and could not be split onto two floppies, you had to use a Zip disk and put your data on 100 MB of storage space, or a little like having a mouse in a cathedral. One thing was OK, however. The 100 MB was expensive; it was about $1.20 a disk.

Things have gotten worse since then. The recordable compact disc came next. Now you can record your own data CDs. Each CD contained a whopping 650,000,000 MB of data, on a disk that now costs a mere 40 cents. Think of it. 6 cents per 1,073,741,824 bytes. An encyclopedia can easily fit onto such a disc. They come in two forms: CD-R and CD-RW. The CD-R is the dirt cheap one, but once you record on it, it is recorded on it forever, much as on an ordinary music CD that you buy in the store. You can't change or erase it. Copying data to such a disc is fast. It takes only about 5 minutes to store half a gigabyte. So if you want to back up your files, you buy Cds at the store. You buy cds every time you want to back up your data, and you throw the old CDs away. This is where it gets wasteful. Because it is cheap to record once and only once, once its usefulness has ended, it gets thrown into our landfills or whatnot and it piles up there, creating pollution. CD-Rs are not the most environmentally friendly medium. Further, if a file on a zip disk was a mouse in a cathedral, a 1.45 MB file on a compact disc is a wasp in a cathedral. An enormous amount of capacity goes wasted. Why not a Zip disk? Because they are much more expensive.

There is another type of compact disc, the CD-RW, only twice as expensive as CD-Rs. These are friendlier to the environment. You create and delete files on them the way you would on a floppy or hard disk drive. However, these are impossibly slow, and they can be read only on CD-RW drives. I tried to back up files recently to a CD-RW and every time it would get hung up on the 25th megabyte and not do any more. I had to give up on it and use CD-Rs and pollute the environment. Why can't they make a better CD-RW? I hear instead they are making DVD discs with 5 GB or so of capacity. That's right, now your 1.45 MB file is a flea in a cathedral. We get better ways of saving hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes onto a medium to stay forever and forever, but we still have nothing efficient for 10 MB worth of data. Computer manufacturers, surely you can give us better options than these.