On Sun, 19 Sep 2004 03:01:41 +0200 (CEST), Carlos E. R.
Kind of :-)
How much can store one of those tapes?
I just checked and the newest SAIT drive can hold .5 TB uncompressed, and they claim 1.3 TB compressed. The drives themselves do the compression. FYI: Last I checked, the SAIT drives cost $13K ea.
Years ago, for the 8086 there were floppies autchangers: you put a stack of a hundred floppies, and it was automatic. Or you used a tape, that at first was larger than the HD capacity. I wonder if there are tape autochangers, or CDrom autochangers.
Lots of tape autochangers. You can spend $100K on a single 6 foot tall "tape library" with 4 high-end tape drives and room for 100+ tapes. Then count on spending another big wade to fill it up with blank media. If you really have money to burn, you can gang upto 5 of those together. (ie. they have side doors to pass the tapes back and forth.
I tend to think that optic media is more durable than magnetic media, for long term archiving; teoretically they should not degraded if kept safely. Magnetic fields get weaker in time, I think - but how on earth can a terabyte be saved even in dvds?
For long term storage (15 years) good-quality tape is still the best solution. Optical seems to degrade after a few years, but I'm not sure why. (FYI: the problem is much worse on ones that are burned. The mass-produced pressed ones last longer.) If you want to store something for 100 years or so, the recommended solution is still micro-fiche (I think). Greg -- Greg Freemyer