see end...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ronald W. Frazier" <arsclistinfo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Hello all,
(Please forgive cross postings.) After reading Mikes reply to my How CD's
and DVD's can fail article, I've been doing extensive research into CD and
DVD media which lead me into studying digital data archiving. I'm going to
be modifying my article to correct some of the errors Mike pointed
out. The field is so broad, my head is spinning. The one conclusion I
came to is that, to really preserve digital data, takes lots of technology
and manpower and planning. One document I read, either from the British
Library or the British Archives (can't remember which) cited a digital mass
storage system that they have. They ingest enormous quantities of data. I
saw a chart which estimated their average cost of maintaining the system
and administration over 5 years to be close to 9 EUROS PER GIGABYTE! That
translates to $12.12 at the current exchange rate. This is an astounding
cost. This means the cost of archiving the data from a standard DVD movie,
4.7 GB, for 5 years, would be 42.3 Euros or $56.97 at the current exchange
rate! It would be cheaper to just buy a couple of movies from the
publisher every 5 years. Of course, with most digital data, you don't have
that luxury. Anyway, this cost factor really surprised me, considering the
almost negligible cost of the storage media itself. I also saw a proposal
for a data storage system for audio visual materials for an agency
affiliated with the US National Archives which is planning to ingest, get
this, 23 TERABYTES PER DAY! That's 23,000 GB / day. So, combining these
two figures, it would seem that this US agency would need to budget $12.12
* 23,000 = $278,760 / day to cover their 5 year data storage costs. This
works out to about $99 Million / year. That sure sounds like a lot to
me. In your experience, does that sound correct?
Actually, I'm in an interesting off-list conversation with Richard
Hess per using hard drives (currently very affordable, with 320GB
drives retailing for Cdn$129!) as another method of digital archiving.
At that price, 32TB would need ten HD's, or about 10xUS$115, or
around $1,150/day (not counting the possibility of lower prices
for mass purchasing, usw.)...
Given that price, and assuming the data doesn't take weekends off,
we get $419,750.00/year...or about1/250 of the cost of the little
adventure in the Middle East...
...stevenc
(note that the death toll for data archival is somewhat lower
as well...)