Archiving

[Jeff Kilgroe]

you just may have holographic sooner than you think ... http://www.edn.com/article/CA6440946.html

Wow, where do these sites keep getting this outdated info.

InPhase drives are available NOW. They have been for a while. They're also selling them rebranded under AGFA and Maxell labels (Maxell manufactures the media). MSRP is $18K, I found that InPhase initially wouldn't sell to me direct and I had to buy from a dealer. The dealers wouldn't budge on their price, so I've talked to InPhase some more since then (they're about a 30 minute drive from my house), over the past month or so. They'll let me be a dealer if I want to get set up and do it, which I don't right now. But anyway, finally did find a dealer that would sell to me for < $16K. Still hugely expensive for 300GB WORM discs. Maxell and InPhase have also said their primary goal with the media right now is to increase shelf-life. Because they only estimate it's good enough for 5 to 10 years. The drives are capable of handling rewritable media too, but that media is still in testing and won't appear until the end of this year or Q1 2008. Discs are about $85 each in packs of 10.

InPhase has placed beta drive units with various large companies, including FOX Networks, who has since come back to buy more of the commercial units.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Jeff what would be the advantage of archiving to holographic right now over backing up to a copy of LTO tapes and waiting for the second and third generation?

It seems like for $9000 you could make a lot of copies and "wait out the technology".

Is it just the convenience of not needing to rotate the data in 5 years?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

As of right now, there is no advantage to holographic -- only the "cool" factor. Shelf life of current media sucks, so you'll have to transfer data in 5 years or so. The drives are really expensive and so is the media. I was just pointing out that the InPhase Tapestry (their holographic drive) is available to buy RIGHT NOW if someone were inclined to do so. I wasn't trying to pick on oiffhollywood or anything for his post. It's just that I keep seeing the same generic article pop up about these drives coming soon, when in fact they started shipping to customers the first week of March. Beta units had been in the hands of testers since May or June of last year.

 

[JohnF]

So far, well in regards to archiving, we are still left with our old friend tape - be it LTO or AIT formats or others.

The issue why we still have to look at tape is simply reliability. I know I will need to, infact I have to, be able to pull out some footage shot 4/5 years before hand and know that it will still work.

I'm sorry but, in my experience, for some reason hard drives that remain inactive for long periods of time seem to suffer from data corruption (from the small to large scale) though my tape based footage shows no sign of degrading, yet... fingers crossed and all that!

So whilst we may work on a production using tapeless work-flows I believe that until a far more reliable format comes out archiving is going to stay tape & film based for a long time yet. As when it comes to archiving reliability is the #1 requirement...

What's more with robotic tape based archives backing up ones production data so that it can be stored at more than one location becomes child's play.

JohnF

 

[vanguy]

I'm sorry but, in my experience, for some reason hard drives that remain inactive for long periods of time seem to suffer from data corruption (from the small to large scale) though my tape based footage shows no sign of degrading, yet... fingers crossed and all that!

It's funny, but I've had the exact opposite experience. I was dealing with DLT-III and DLT-IV and had very bad luck bringing media back online. But apart from an IBM drive failure (and they were known to be bad) I've never had HDD media go bad.

If I needed something archived and it had to be bulletproof, I'd do both, and cycle the media after 4 or 5 years.