The amount of digital information entering the home will increase significantly in the future. The consumer at home will want to store some of this information. Especially the storage of digital video will require tens of Gigabytes of storage capacity (a library of 200 movies will require one Terabyte of storage). The only storage technology available in the near future to handle this will be magnetic tape. However tape drives have some disadvantages such as long wind times. Also a tape drive can only perform one operation at a time: either recording a program or playing back another one.
The aim of the SMASH project is to investigate the possibilities to eliminate the disadvantages of tape drives and to extend even their possibilities. One of the goals is to realize a storage system that can at the same time record a program and playback another program using only one tape drive. Such a system should be connectable to digital satellite receivers and be able to record in a transparent way the digital broadcasts, including all the extra information which is transmitted along with the broadcast.
To support such services and new features more demands will be put on the storage system at home. To realize this several objectives have been defined.
The first one is to integrate the tape drive with a hard disk. In this integrated unit the tape drive will be for mass storage and the disk will serve to store information which needs to be accessed interactively. The user should not be bothered with where information is stored and therefore a management system is necessary that allocates the information automatically. Moreover it should be investigated how the hard disk in the system can realize much faster search than what is possible with a tape drive only.
The second objective is to study and realize the downloading and storage of all the new services that will enter the home. By downloading often used information ahead of time, the user can avoid network peak-charges but also improve the access time. Therefore optimally an interactive application makes use both of the storage in the information server and of the information available on his local storage. The challenge is to develop an integrated approach for various applications that use both storage systems efficiently.
The third objective is that we have to solve the problem of the bit rates of the services which enter the home. The bit rates are not fixed and may vary even within one service. The current tape drives support only one or a few discrete data rates. It is therefore necessary to investigate how the hard disk can function as a buffer between the service and the tape drive. Moreover the access time of the tape drives needs to be improved as well as the storage capacity such that the user has a vast amount of information available on one cassette. Information capacities of more than 100 Gigabytes are foreseen on one cassette.
The overall objective of the project is therefore "to develop and show the technical feasibility of an integrated storage unit that is connected to the network and other consumer equipment and that enables to download, store and retrieve at home all future multimedia applications."
In the future this storage unit at home may even function as the local storage server inside the home being able to deliver information to the entertainment equipment as well as to the PC's in the home. This makes it necessary to develop a cost effective interconnection system for the home.
The end result of the project will be the demonstration of an integrated storage system, based upon state-of-the-art advanced key components, that will contain a disk and a tape drive. One or more important applications will be developed on this system in order to show the possibilities of the SMASH system.
Besides showing the technical feasibility the aim is also to actively work on the standardization of such a system. For the tape system this means the standardization on how the information is written onto the tape.