a volatile conversation topic indeed!
my 2 cents: think in the long haul. "burned" dvds are non-archival. there are too many issues with the quality of the blanks(mfg's dont exacly test every disc), the effectiveness of any burner over heavy usage (are you willing to manually test and verify each burn?), and the persistance of the format you select (will you be able to buy a dvd+r capable drive in 20 years?)
but then what to do, what to do?
there's always tape drives, but for anything over 80 gbs of data, your overall system price starts to make your ears bleed. i love tape robots, but they are an enterprise level solution.
my suggestion would be reduntant hard disc array. massive drives are among us. a terabyte of raid 5 storage can be tossed together for under 1k. with the new perpendicular writing technologies coming out, current drive prices will be coming down. building a network area storage device with an enterprise level raid controller can be done for under 1500$. at that point you can add drives to the array as you need them. selecting a good manufacturer like seagate with a 5 year warrenty, and running this device solely for archiving, minimizing its usage means your drive failure rate should not push your yearly maintenance costs above 1-200 bucks.
anyway i am rambling. basically you need to determine your budget and how much data you really need to store.
sorry for the delay in responding. (i just got back from puerto rico and a place without internet). thanks for you advice though.
thank god the order for the external dvd burner i put in didn't actually go through.
i like the redundant hard disk array idea because it seems like it will easily be expandable. part of the problem, is that i really have no idea how much data we will really need to store. i think i can assess some of that now, but some of it is out of my hands and depends on how successful we are. (actually, thinking that my data may be useful in 10-20yrs is a touch on the optimistic side...but it's still better to have it backed up).
emile - 2005-06-09 17:17:24
a volatile conversation topic indeed! my 2 cents: think in the long haul. "burned" dvds are non-archival. there are too many issues with the quality of the blanks(mfg's dont exacly test every disc), the effectiveness of any burner over heavy usage (are you willing to manually test and verify each burn?), and the persistance of the format you select (will you be able to buy a dvd+r capable drive in 20 years?) but then what to do, what to do? there's always tape drives, but for anything over 80 gbs of data, your overall system price starts to make your ears bleed. i love tape robots, but they are an enterprise level solution. my suggestion would be reduntant hard disc array. massive drives are among us. a terabyte of raid 5 storage can be tossed together for under 1k. with the new perpendicular writing technologies coming out, current drive prices will be coming down. building a network area storage device with an enterprise level raid controller can be done for under 1500$. at that point you can add drives to the array as you need them. selecting a good manufacturer like seagate with a 5 year warrenty, and running this device solely for archiving, minimizing its usage means your drive failure rate should not push your yearly maintenance costs above 1-200 bucks. anyway i am rambling. basically you need to determine your budget and how much data you really need to store.lani - Tue 14 Jun 2005 23:37:24
sorry for the delay in responding. (i just got back from puerto rico and a place without internet). thanks for you advice though. thank god the order for the external dvd burner i put in didn't actually go through. i like the redundant hard disk array idea because it seems like it will easily be expandable. part of the problem, is that i really have no idea how much data we will really need to store. i think i can assess some of that now, but some of it is out of my hands and depends on how successful we are. (actually, thinking that my data may be useful in 10-20yrs is a touch on the optimistic side...but it's still better to have it backed up).