Posted by Jan Panteltje on 07/17/07 17:28

On a sunny day (Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:38:31 +0200) it happened Martin Heffels
<goofies@flikken.net> wrote in <3dop93165bnmqt98506stg285t57jtipc2@4ax.com>:

>>The hurdle the harddisk manufacturers - and probably tape makers -
>>face is how to get more bits per square inch.
>
>Question is: do we want that? For the consumer-market i would say,
>yes, but I doubt the professional market would want that. Production
>insurance companies for instance, don't like hard-disk masters, so
>demand you make backups on LTO3-tapes, because it has proven to be
>more reliable (and have better error correction).

Yes, true, harddisk masters are very vulnerable, drop one and all is gone.
If we leave magnetics aside there is this holographic optical thing
http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/13/inphase-300gb-holographic-storage-solution-out-the-door

I dunno what Sony is doing here:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/18/sony-demos-cheap-holographic-recording-technique

But I think optical media have a big plus over tapes.
Dropouts, fungus in moist climates are for example things tapes are sensitive to.

Given change in technology we will have to backup digital again on some new medium likely
every 10 years or more often...

Of course it could all end up on one little chip :-)
No moving parts.
1 Tera Byte SDcards?
If you extrapolate the curve I'd say 'yes'.

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