Customer Reviews

Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics: The Essential Guide (Embedded Technology)

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With over ten years of experience in the Embedded Systems Electrical Engineering field, I must say that this is one of the better books I have read when it comes to clarity and ease of reading. Mr. Coughlin does a nice job covering the different storage technologies. He also touches on up and coming technologies that got me wondering what will be hitting the markets next and how I might incorporate them into the products I design. I recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about digital data storage.

In Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics: The Essential Guide (Embedded Technology) Tom Coughlin has written the definitive and essential guide to digital storage in consumer electronics providing clear and concise explanations of the various technologies commonly used and relied upon in our daily lives. From cell phones, to MP3 players, from DVRs and Tivos at home to FLASH and SSD devices, Tom provides a unique behind the scene look into how the technology works, what to look for and consolidation as well as perspectives on why designers make different choices to balance functionality with manufacturability.

For the consumer, this book provides a great behind the scene look into how technology works including photos, block diagrams and explanation of various devices as well as a glimpse into the future not to mention why and how things work, or, why they break due to exposure to the wrong elements and why. For technology marketers and designers, this book provides great perspectives to help position compare and contrast as well as discuss the current and emerging technologies to customers, partners and others.

With a growing focus around Solid State Devices (SSD) for storing data, this is a must read book on how various technologies work and other considerations not only for consumer, as well as business computing. I suggest and recommend this book be on any IT professionals, or, consumer electronic aficionado or techno geek's book shelf.

Greg Schulz - Founder StorageIO, Author The Green and Virtual Data Center and Resilient Storage Networks: Designing Flexible Scalable Data Infrastructures (Digital Press Storage Technology)

This book provides a highly readable framework which connects all the storage technologies that we use in today's gadgets.
It covers the principles and implementation of disk, optical and solid state storage in a wide renge of devices from GPS devices to DVR's.

Data storage is one of the least-understood, most undervalued and poorly publicized technologies of modern times.
Perhaps the industry has been so busy creating all this magic that we haven't taken the time to secure appropriate media coverage.

It's refreshing to see a broad view and Tom Coughlin presents technical descriptions, market data and real applications in a highly readable way.
My personal favorites are the block diagrams and internal photos of devices and systems.

The technical level of this book is a good match for a range of audiences including engineering, marketing and sales people. Students will also find it a valuable map to a bewildering complexity of concepts.
It provides enough technical detail to grasp how these things actually work, while avoiding mathematics and simultaneously positioning the technologies in an articulate and interesting way.

Tom Coughlin is a well-known analyst of the data storage industry. He shares the considerable breadth and depth of his experience in this book, Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics.

The first chapters present a helpful look inside magnetic, optical, and flash storage devices. The history described for the hard disk drive's evolution provides insight for what to expect in future flash-based storage products. His analogy of the operation of NAND versus NOR flash makes it easy to keep the distinction clear. There are good summaries of the capabilities and histories of many storage formats and interfaces.

Tom shares his practical insights throughout the book. He provides useful rules-of-thumb, discusses what to expect beyond HDTV, and he explores the role of media center computers in replacing DVRs. His comments about automatic metadata creation and its ability to revolutionize the usefulness of new and historical data are thought-provoking.

The book was published in early 2008, before the full impact of the economic downturn could be factored into analysts' predictions. Tom provides a solution for this by making more-recent information available at the "TomCoughlin" website under the heading "Presentations and Articles."

This book is a comprehensive, detailed, and useful reference for data storage or consumer electronics professionals who need to understand this rapidly changing industry.

I am the author of this book. I wrote this book to fill several needs that I thought weren't well satisfied by other books now available. First I wanted to provide a good review of how various storage devices common in consumer devices work and how they differ from each other. My intention was to make an accessible book that could be used by technical readers as well as in an educational setting.

I then wanted to create a digital storage hierarchy for consumer electronics as a guide to which storage device or devices should be used for various consumer applications. Rules for the choice and integration of digital storage in consumer devices are laid out for the reader/designer.

Sections explore the design of digital storage in both mobile and static consumer devices. These sections are well illustrated by block diagrams and pictures of torn-down products showing the design and digital storage integration.

I also explore the drivers for digital storage growth in consumer applications and how those will change with the growth of richer user generated as well as commercial content, with changing storage devices and with entirely new applications. These new applications will be enabled by new digital storage technology as well as advances in mobile power, networking and processing power.

Looking into the future consumer devices are described that will cause huge growth of user generated content in the home as well as sharing and social networking driving increased storage demand as folks throughout the net share their experiences and content. As the amount and complexity of personal and commercial content increases there will be an increasing need for organizing and indexing this material (automated metadata generation) as well as reducing the physical complexity of managing content across a great many devices in the home. The book suggests how these challenges can be met.

Finally I wanted to provide the reader resources to explore these topics further. I also include information on various trade and standards groups working on all aspects of digital storage and consumer electronics. I enjoyed writing this book and hope that readers and educators will find this book useful. Thank you for reading this review and I hope that you will enjoy the book as well.

Tom Coughlin is an acknowledged authority on data storage and a respected presenter on storage and storage networking technology at conferences and events worldwide. For the past ten years, the focus of data storage has been on large data center system storage area networks (SANs) based on Fibre Channel. As with many high-end technologies, however, enterprise-class applications eventually trickle down to the small business market and eventually to useful consumer products. Essentially, the large enterprises which have the most immediate need pay for the research and development of new technologies, with the benefits eventually spreading to a much broader class of users.

Having tracked and contributed to (he has six patents relating to storage) this development over the past 25 years, Tom Coughlin is well positioned to examine the diversity of storage technologies that have evolved for consumer-level products. Minaturized hard disks, optical storage, solid state memory devices and flash technology are enabling new consumer products that were inconceivable a few decades ago. Digital storage for MP3 players, video players, digital photography and other products are empowering consumers by allowing them to tailor their media to their own tastes and to have it constantly available.

Although this book has substantial technical content for interested engineers, it also provides lucid explanations of digital storage technologies that will be of interest to non-technical readers as well. This book is Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Recommended Reading for anyone wanting to under the next large wave of digital storage applications.