Tapes and close to a quarter-century.

[Jerry Feldman]

On Thursday 21 September 2006 9:32 am, Tom Buskey wrote:
> I recently went through my older media (5.25 floppies, 3.5 floppies, 2GB
> 4mm, zip drives, syquest) and burned them to CD.  I think I converted
> .ARC files to .ZIP along the way.  I highly recommend doing this every
> now and then.  Magnetic media will fade over time due to the earth's
> magnetic field.
Actually, while CDs and DVDs are better than magnetic media, they do fail 
after a while. There was a recent study that mentioned that. 

> I remember thinking 1.2MB floppies will be around for a long time.  Try
> buying a laptop or PC with any kind of floppy now!  
True. if you want a floppy today, you probably need to get an external USB. 
Additionally, most systems are going to SATA drives today rather than the 
IDE drives we are used to.
> Tape seems to stick around a bit, but capacities keep
> going up and prices stay the same (~ $1k for a 4mm drive).  CDs have to
> potential to be around for a long time.  Eventually they'll be replaced,
> but I imagine it'll be more then 10 years before you can't buy a machine
> that'll read them.
The advantage of tape is that the price per byte is very low, and a very 
large amount of data can be stored. The advantage here is for commercial 
backup purposes where businesses store a lot of their data offsite, and 
after Katrina, we learned that local offsite storage facilities are not 
enough. I worked for a bank DP center in Miami, and we had a tape vault 
building on the other side of the parking lot. Today, they probably have a 
duplicate set of tapes in Atlanta. 

I suspect that the optical technology we are now using for CDs will continue 
to morph into the new HD DVD technology using similar media, but it is very 
possible that the drives may not be able to read the older CDs. But, we are 
also seeing the cost of solid-state memory coming down. How many of us 
carry thumb drives on our keychains. Right now a data DVD can hold about 
8GB the flash drives are up to at least 4GB (but at a significantly higher 
price per byte). Solid state storage is kind of the holy grail of media, 
but given the speed at which the technology is moving, it could possibly 
replace CDs and DVDs as storage devices. 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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