On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:54:56 -0500, Antares 531
<gordonlrDELETE@swbell.net> wrote:
>You are right on most of the above, but I still think someone or some
>company could design a reliable, long-lasting storage media, then
>design an interface similar to a USB hub (not a USB hub, but something
>similar) that would handle any needed translation from old file format
>to whatever the new computer could use.
>
>The translation hub would have to be replaced each time computers
>changed enough to limit the ability to communicate with this
>translation hub. But replacing the translation hub should not be
>formidably expensive.
>
>If I had a translation hub such as this, that was designed to read
>those old 3.5 inch high density floppy discs, and if this hub was
>designed to connect to my computer using a Firewire connection, I
>could read those old floppy discs by putting them into an external
>drive that was designed for them.
>
>Then, when my present computer becomes obsolete and I replace it with
>a new one that uses totally different technology, this translation hub
>would have to be replaced. The replacement hub would still have to
>interact with the old 3.5 inch floppy drive, but it would communicate
>with the new computer by some new means.
>
>Gordon
Why would you want such a thing? Who else would want such a thing? I
can't imagine enough would be sold to break even on the development
costs. I certainly wouldn't buy one.
Looking at storage from a pure capacity perspective, floppies
(8/5.25/3.5 inch) are obsolete because they just don't hold a
meaningful amount of data by current standards. For a short time,
archiving to CDs (650-700M
seemed like a viable alternative, but
they very quickly became too small, as well. Then there was archiving
to DVDs (4.5-8.5G
, but that too was almost immediately too small to
be convenient. Only the most barren system can be backed up to a DVD
or two.
So that leaves us with hard drives and their spinning platters that
are fairly fragile, but it's still arguably the best we've got. Even
there, capacity is a big issue. The biggest capacity is currently only
2TB (1.8TB usable), so a system with a lot of data needs multiple
drives, and then another set of multiple drives for backups, and
perhaps a third set of drives for offsite backup, and so on. Flash
(SSD) drives are showing promise, but aren't mainstream quite yet.
I think the best you can do is, as others have said, stay on top of
the technology curve by migrating your data every so often to newer
technology so as to avoid stranding it on obsolete media.