Quote:
Originally Posted by RonDent
Z,
You are right. Just pointing out that you're not getting away from (using) media.
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True.
May I also point out that solid state also has a limited life -- it can only do so many reads and writes during its lifetime before memory sectors become unreadable/unwritable. BTW: CD's DVD's, and BD's also have a limited shelf life, before the silicon backing starts to peel, and the data becomes corrupt. All digital media has a limited life expectancy. Most modern storage devices have longer life expectancies, but nonetheless, as far as I know, no digital media lasts forever. At least not yet... And even if a CD were to last forever, in 4-5 generations of removable media, there won't be devices out there which can read that data -- backwards compatibility can only go so far. Same applies to your USB stick -- how are you going to read data off of that media when USB ports have been replaced by the next best interface port?
I know that a few years ago, the brains at IBM were working on a new type of non-magnetic media - one that uses divots on plastic for the 1's and 0's of the digital work. These divots were placed on plastic on the nano-level (ie: very small dots). A series of prongs would sweep over the dots and interpret the data, kind of like a music box does. The benefit: it was not subject to magnetic corruption, and the data could theoretically be kept forever. the drawback -- not ideal for storing in hot environments. Not sure how much they will pursue that technology, as solid state storage seems to be the direction most storage vendors (EMC, IBM, NetApp, Hitachi) are migrating towards. (Still very expensive media...)
Incidentally, I am a SAN/Storage architect for my company, and have been involved in enterprise-level storage for close to 20 years. In my opinion, the best way to protect data is Raid technology, combined with data duplication in an offsite facility. But while this methodology works for a corporation, it can get too costly for the average consumer. Hence the cloud, which typically will offer at least Raid technology, and possibly data duplication.
-Z-man.