[ale] Cendyne external USB cd-rw

[James P. Kinney III]

An excellent question!

The last time I was pricing drives and media was about 2 years ago.
Drives were in the $300-$500 and media was in the $10-$50 range and went
up to ~6G for double-sided 5-1/4. The media is read faster than any tape
drive and faster than many current low-end hard drives (for the
expensive drives). The write speed is still around 1/2 the read speed,
but the life expectancy is around 100 years for the rewritable and 200
years for the WORM versions.

MO drives are the preferred medium for medical data storage and
government data storage as the life span is so high. They are often
found in big jukeboxes. Sadly, HP no longer makes MO jukeboxes. They
made a really good one (forgot the model) that had a max of 12 drives
and a max of 240 disks. 

On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 22:39, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> So what's good in MO drives these days?  What's the media capacity in
> this day and age?
> 
> - Jeff
> 
> On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 22:38, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 20:28, Jeff Rose wrote:
> > >  What would be a better long term archive format?  Removable
> > > drives?  I want something that will allow easy access to my data for
> > > many, many years.  
> > 
> > Magneto-optical drives are the best long-term storage medium by all
> > engineering standards. But they are relatively expensive.  Magnetic tape
> > in proper storage is a distant second. CD-R in proper storage is a
> > distant third. Removable hard drive is on par with CD-R.
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
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GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
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