1237dac87a57
tech



Hello Pascal - 

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CA>> Point is there is little/no price difference so why use
CA>> floppies?

PS> Why indeed. I don't even have a floppy drive in my machine
PS> anymore. They are notoriously unreliable and too small for
PS> most of the stuff people exchange today. I just wanted to
PS> point out that writable CDs also leave something to be
PS> desired. What I would like to have is a medium that can be
PS> used for both data exchange (so it should hold a good
PS> amount of data) and backups (also lots of data, but needs
PS> to be extremely reliable, even for long-time storage). 

PS> I use a 640M MO drive for my backups. Data on that is
PS> supposed to last for 30 years, good enough for me. The
PS> discs are rewritable, but MOs are no good for data exchange
PS> since nobody around here except for me has a drive. The
PS> discs are cheap at about 6 Euros each, but a drive costs
PS> about 300-400 Euros. 

PS> If I were to buy a newer 3.5" MO drive, it could handle the
PS> newer 1.3G discs in addition to the 640M discs I have now
PS> and the older 128M, 256M, and 512M discs. That's another
PS> good things about MO drives: they can still read and for
PS> the most part also write the discs from 30 years ago, back
PS> when the technology was invented. There is even an ISO
PS> standard describing the disc format. 

PS> Well, but since not many people have MO drives, I have to
PS> resort to putting stuff onto CD-RW or DVD+RW if I have to
PS> give somebody a lot of data. 

I remember reading about magneto-optical years ago but not much
recently. I guess the cost-per-megabyte isn't competitive
enough right now but you are correct it seems CD burning is not
good long-term archival storage. :-\ 

>
>        ,                          ,
>      o/      Charles.Angelich      \o       ,
>       __o/
>     / >          USA, MI           < \   __\__
 

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