11 Mar
2011
11 Mar
'11
1:49 p.m.
On 3/11/11 12:48 PM, Richard wrote:
And that was Al's point -- heads touching the
medium do bad things in
the context of archival processes.
I guess I was being too clever with that post. What I trying to express
was my dislike of magnetic tape and floppies. Both require the media
to be in contact with the head to work. Magnetic and optical rigid disks
do not.
My current preferred archival medium are high capacity SATA disks, and a
LOT of redundancy. I am in the process of migrating from PATA RAID 5 to
SATA JBOD with software to track failed drives. Part of the archival monitoring
process is to run verification passes on the offline drives. This is not
practical with tapes, where head and media wear directly effect the survival
of the storage medium and the transport.
I'll probably have to come up with a different scheme once the archive gets to
be over a couple of hundred terabytes.