Advantages of solid state media. Was:one good ripoff deserves another / Iomega Zip's

On 04/22/2012 09:47 AM, Alexandre Souza - Listas wrote: One of the problems I have with these kinds of things is that storage technology changes reasonably fast - i.e. five years down the road I've no idea if I'll be able to get hold of SD cards. For that reason I keep wondering if it makes sense to split the 'modern interface' side out onto a separate board, leaving the 'core' as a SCSI interface, CPU and expansion port. When SD's hard to get hold of, simply plug in a new adapter board for whatever technology is readily available and download the relevant firmware so that the adapter's CPU can drive it (with some technologies - such as CF - the CPU can probably drive the 'modern interface' directly, but with others I'm sure it would require some intelligence on the plug-in card). I suppose a "SCSI to Ethernet" adapter might be nice, too - don't worry about having the storage local to the vintage machine at all, but have it in an image file on a modern PC somewhere out on the network. Assuming that wired Ethernet in its current form is going to stick around for a useful amount of time, of course :-) cheers Jules