[QuadList] Quad Libraries--White House Communications Agency

[C. Park Seward]

There really isn't a perfect preservation medium. Optical media would  
seem to be the perfect choice since it is digital, small and cheap but  
the lifespan is suspect. Magnetic tape actually has performed better  
than many would have predicted: I see 50 year old tapes that play fine.

Stone cuttings work well but take up too much space. :-)

I have been told that hard drives don't take well to storage. Put one  
on the shelf and in a few years it won't spin up.

RAID 5 (striped disks with parity) is an excellent choice for on-line  
storage since it protects in case of a drive failure. A Quantel box I  
had used nine disks in an array, one for each bit and a parity drive.  
If any drive failed, the box would continue working until you replaced  
the failed drive and then automatically, in the background, rebuild  
the new drive.

Best,
Park

C. Park Seward
Visit us: http://www.videopark.com



On Jan 6, 2009, at 6:22 AM, Steve Greene wrote:

>  I'm well aware that digital files offer a number of advantages over  
> video cassettes, but the National Archives is only starting to  
> develop the kind of infrastructure needed to maintain those files as  
> an archive.  I don't trust a shelf of removable hard drives much  
> more than I trust magnetic tape.  Recordable DVD has too many  
> interchange problems and is too fragile to qualify as a reference  
> medium.

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