It is amazing that a computer in a home you may buy for your teenage kid can outperform the storage available in a modern airliner by more than a 1000 factor.
2 hours of voice recording on a plane that may be designed to fly 16-18 hours?
In case of MH370 which may have flown for up to 8 hours and if so the voice recordings in the first two hours maybe a lot more important than the last two hours. Especially if (at least) one pilot was incapacitated for whatever reason.
The best I can gather is that the audio quality of the CVR used today is 31 kbps.
A 1TB SSD recording at 64 kbps will can store more than 72000 hours (1 channel)at twice the quality.
I believe current CVR's use either 3 or 4 channels, but even using 10 channels (some in the cabin as well), 7200 hours equals 300 days.
Based on the assumption that a CVR and a FDR use the same storage media with the FDR yielding ~12 times duration of a 4-channel CVR a 1 TB SSD would store 9000 days of data (the life of most airframes) ... all for under $1,000 (excluding DAQ which would likely be the same as current recorders).
Using the same storage media (1TB SSD), the use of 10 video cameras in full motion mode would record 40 hours of video.
Time to use current technology, methinks
State of the art technology does not have to be safe to be installed in your teenage kids' PC. Failures are an inconvenience not a disaster.
Keeping safety critical systems safe means they may run a generation (or two) behind the latest capabilities. That is not a bad thing.
Let's face it, using "current technology" batteries in aircraft has created a few issues recently.