RE: [AV Media Matters] Analogue vs digital tape stock

[Jim Wheeler <Jimwheeler@aol.com>]

Jeff

It depends on how much data you want to store.

As I said, hard drives should be duplicated because of the possibility of a
head crash.

Happy Holidays,

Jim Wheeler

Moderators Comment:
I have tried to stay out of this "store the hard drives" thread - but alas
it seems to have gotten a bit of a head of steam here - so time for a bit of
"devils advocate". Now I don't know how many of you have tried to wrassle
with installing a hard drive controller and an unknown disk type lately -
but we had the dubious pleasure here a few months ago, and I can tell you
from a direct personal experience that this is much harder then you may
think. We were trying to install some SCSI drives (high performance) on a PC
and there are just tons of variables that one is not likely to know many
years after a disk is created. How many cylinders - formatting information -
on and on and on. Further there are many interface "standards" and MANY
variants within SCSI for instance - SCSI is not SCSI, there were many
different flavors and performance levels and even the interface is
different.... a MAC SCSI is different from an IBM SCSI - and things are not
necessarily backward compatible. The issues of operating system come into
play as well, disk formatting, device drivers, really this is
hardware/firmware/ driver hell. If one were to use UNIX one might have a
better chance of things - but imagine trying to play back a removeable disk
pack from say 1975 - only 25 years ago - and you start to realize that this
plan is not very realistic. In 1975 a 25 megabyte removeable drive was a BIG
deal (literally and figuratively), and interfacing it to a modern system
would be almost impossible. In the DEC world (remember them - Digital
Equipment Corporation - now part of Compaq) this would mean a pdp11 probably
running rsx11m operating system. Other vendors would be equally obsolete.
Also - if you have ever looked at a drive controller or inside a drive - it
would not inspire confidence that one could EVER figure out what was going
on to make it work after a long period of time has elapsed - and the
longevity of the materials is a real question mark.... sorry - I really
can't go along with this one.

jim