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Re: [ARSCLIST] Hard disk drives and DAT
At 05:48 PM 2007-03-26, Tom Fine wrote:
I hope Richard and/or Parker and/or Spec Bros. jump in here. The
ONLY answer is managed and constantly migrated storage. You simply
cannot live by the old "put it on a shelf in a clean, cool room"
idea anymore. Digital storage must be in constant motion --
literally since hard drives have been known to fail or never start
up again if left idle on a shelf (ask around Hollywood, everyone has
a horror story or two). You have to plan to have a "living" hard
drive array that is redundant, preferably with a constantly mirrored
clone at a different location, and plan on swapping out drives every
XX hours of use or at worst when they inevitably fail. There are
firms that do this on an out-source basis, I think. I believe the
90's dot-bomb term was "storage farms." Some of them are actually
located in old bomb shelters and missle bunkers.
Tom, I don't know why you'd want Parker, Peter, or me to jump in
here. You stated it excellently yourself.
While I don't think we need a mass storage system for someone's
wedding tape -- that will work nicely with several gold CD copies
(LOCKSS - LotsOfCopiesKeepStuffSafe), much above that you really do
need managed storage.
The good news is that many Universities and other organizations are
implementing such storage systems and if you wish to make your
material publicly available, especially, you can find sites willing
to host your material in perpetuity for a relatively small fee.
The metadata and search capabilities of some of these systems -- and
being an organized repository the ability of it to be included in
federated searches -- is excellent. There are fewer options if you
want to squirrel your data away someplace and keep it hidden. But
that is another discussion.
There has been a rather heated discussion over on AMIA-L about the
shelf-storage model of HDDs which Jim Wheeler is promoting. I think
it has flaws -- especially when you consider a movie is in the
neighbourhood of 5TB or more.
LTO is becoming one of the few options with a future. I think one of
the other tape formats is at end of life now. I'm not sure which one.
S-AIT has not been getting much traction. LTO (LinearTapeOpen) is
gathering supporters. The neat thing is that it is OPEN, as in NOT
proprietary.
As all manner of data multiplies and remultiplies, we will continue
to see more attractive storage options, but bringing the data into a
digital repository is a good method for the future.
Here is a community that I have nothing to do with at Univ of
Toronto's T-Space, but I've been studying this as a model for my
project that will hopefully drop into T-Space in a year or so.
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/3004
The "Community" that I am working on will be at this level in the
system. Note that there are persistent handles for all the items.
Each item can contain multiple files. That's the D-Space model.
T-Space (U of T's implementation of the D-Space system from MIT and
HP) includes checksums and the hardware is IBM with the Tivoli
Storage Manager and LTO tape underneath.
One neat thing I just negotiated is that I will make MD5 hashes of my
files and then when they get in T-Space, I will get the MD-5 hashes
generated automatically within T-Space back and I'll run a comparison
between the T-Space MD-5 hashes and my originals. That way, I can be
sure that (a) all files got onto T-Space and (b) There is no
corruption of any files.
While D-Space is one model, ContentDM is another which I don't know
anything substantial about. There are others. The nice thing about
D-Space is there is a link between my client and Univ of Toronto so
they have access to place their oral history archive at something
that is part of the U of T library.
Cheers,
Richard
Richard L. Hess email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.