RE: [AV Media Matters] Let's just get rid of tape and optical mediaentirely

[Charles Repka <Charles.P.Repka@abc.com>]

Jim

I'm surprised.  You of all people.  To advocate a specific mechanism
and method archiving data.  You, sitting on a virtual museum of old,
obsolete media formats.  Yes, the cost of hard drives will continue
to come down and become competitive with other storage media.  But a
hard  drive is just another media.  It is just a bunch of spinning
magnetic discs.  We are rapidly approaching the packing limits  that
can be achieved with magnetic media.  And it will most likely be
replace by some form of quantum mechanism ( I'm serious)  And what
makes you think that you will still have the proper computer
interface to retrieve the data stored on your stack of hard drives,
20, 30 or 50 years from now?  Assuming they're still functional that
is

Charles Repka

>In essence - I am now thinking that in addition to a medialess
>archive - a concept that I introduced a long time ago - we need to
>think in other local storage directions too - and one of those
>thoughts was brought on by a comment Jim Wheeler made - as quoted
>below. Basically I wonder if we should just forget about Tape and
>optical media entirely for archival purposes and jump directly to
>hard drive server based systems. As time has gone on - my own answer
>to this question is, in general, yes, this is what we should be
>doing.