[Talk] Re: [SAGE-AU] Reality check...

[Neil Brown]

On Wednesday September 11, sjenkin at pcug.org.au wrote:
> I had a thought & wanted a Reality Check on it.
> It seems too obvious not to have been thought of before, so what's the
> catch??
> 
> IDEA:
> The cost of DLT & LTO tape media is ~$3/Gb.
> The cost of commodity IDE drives is ~$1-2/Gb.  IDE enclosures with
> either Firewire or USB are cheap & readily available.
> 
> Why aren't people moving away from tape media to removable IDE drives
> [and treat them just the same way as tapes.  Normally kept on a
> shelf!]

"Normally kept in the shelf"... but what if they fall off the shelf?
  Disk drive:  possibly dead.
  Tape:   still works fine.

Plus I don't have a library robot that can move IDE drives around.

But the idea could still has some merit.

NeilBrown