Hi Charles! :-)

 PS>> Water does not conduct electricity too well. ;) 
 CA> Distilled water does not conduct electricity. Water with
 CA> impurities does. 
The water cooling systems for CPUs that I've read reports about all used
distilled waters. The authors of said reports had the same reservations as
you at the start, then they found out. ;)

[...]
 PS>> No technology to do that seems ready to do the same job.
 PS>> Flash wears off quickly compared to hard disks. 
 CA> I did say "or something similar". :-) 
I know. I just didn't want other reader to think "flash" is
really the answer.

 CA> Point is there is little/no price difference so why use
 CA> floppies? 
Why indeed. I don't even have a floppy drive in my machine anymore. They
are notoriously unreliable and too small for most of the stuff people
exchange today. I just wanted to point out that writable CDs also leave
something to be desired. What I would like to have is a medium that can be
used for both data exchange (so it should hold a good amount of data) and
backups (also lots of data, but needs to be extremely reliable, even for
long-time storage).

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

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

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

Ciao
Pascal

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