Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/09/01
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Much of my "day job" concerns itself with storing large amounts of data. By far the cheapest way to store large amounts of data is to put the data onto several high-capacity hard drives and then turn them off. To store data online costs about $0.50/gigabyte/year. A year ago it was a dollar a gigabyte a year. That is the fully-allocated cost of buying disks, buying computers to put them in, renting space in data centers to put those computers in, and so forth. Today's newspaper advertises 160-gigabyte hard drives for $79 each. If I bought 3 of them, and wrote the same data to all 3, and sent one to a far-away place for safe keeping, I'd have stored 50 gigabytes for 80 dollars, and it will be good for at least 10 years. I can leave one of them turned on, and the other two turned off and put into a fireproof place. Tapes are far too expensive for me. It costs about 10 times as much money to put data on tape for safekeeping as to put it on 3 hard drives, and the tapes don't last as long. - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html