Records, 8-Tracks and Other Reasons To Update Your Storage Media
by Jeremy Button
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Spending some time sorting through your old CDs, 3-inch disks, and yes, even your 5-inch disks may help more than you think. Take on the daunting task of upgrading to a newer storage media and save yourself the cash and frustration that are sure to come later if you don’t.
So what is wrong with my CDs and 3-inch disks?
Some of us are more than a little resistant to the idea of improving on something that still works. Three-inch disks, for example, are a quick way of sharing and backing up files. They are cheap, easy to find, and nearly everyone has a 3-inch disk drive. However, this hardware, commonly known as the “A drive,” may be seeing its last days. Some called Apple crazy when it stopped adding these 3-inch floppy drives to its computers more than five years ago. Now it seems that the rest of the computing arena is following suit. The floppy drive officially became optional in Dell computers in April 2003. It is expected that most other manufacturers will follow suit in the near future.
What are we to do without the floppy drives that we have grown to love over the past 18 years? We move on. If quick and easy storage is your goal, take a look at a USB flash drive. It is about the size of a standard house key and uses the standard USB connection. The upper-end USB flash drives can hold two gigabytes of data. That is equivalent to 1,388 3-inch floppies! At a price of about $750, you may not be ready to declare an early spring-cleaning at your office or house. Maybe if I mentioned that the 64-megabyte USB drive runs about $25, you would reach for the garbage can.
One downside to the USB flash drives is that storage life on them has been established at about 10 years. We know the USB flash drives are not the long-term storage device of choice. None of us would pay $750 to store two gigabytes of files on a USB drive permanently when we could spend less than a $1 for three CDs that will hold the same amount for close to 100 years. Is there anything wrong with using CDs for long-term storage? Some might argue that there is.
CDs still are a viable long-term storage option. With a customary 700 megabytes of space, they are probably the most cost-effective medium available to us today. But don’t swipe all the CDs off the store shelf just yet. DVDs are quickly dropping in price, and with a standard 4.7 gigabytes in storage space, they may just be worth the wait. It wouldn’t be surprising to see DVDs with more storage become the standard, however. One common problem that plagues both CDs and DVDs is the inevitable scratch. Sometimes the scratch can be repaired, but oftentimes we lose at least one, if not all, of the files on the media. This thought alone will have us making backups of backups forever. The most important idea here is to avoid jumping headfirst into a project using one specific type of storage media that we find is being deprecated by manufacturers later the same year.
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How do I find what is right for my city or company?
The best thing any person, city or company can do when deciding what is best for it is to plan. Make sure you understand what your needs are. If you need to keep copies of your files for only five years, it would be best not to invest in an expensive storage media that will outlive your grandchildren. On the other hand, you do not want to be the company that decided to standardize on the 5-inch disk and made up its mind never to look back. Now, however, that company is finding that its files are corrupt because of a shorter storage life, it can’t share files with other businesses, and it no longer has technical support on its aging 5-inch disk drives.
Investigate the storage media market and read user reviews of the devices that you are considering. If possible, and if it’s not too expensive, consider trying several types to see how your employees are able to manage them. This brings up an important point – standardization. This should be the final step in your process, and you should do your best to stick to your guns. There will be certain cases in which it is not feasible for everyone to use the same storage media – but this should be the goal. It will save you hassle from support in the short term, and storage and retrieval problems in the longer term.
Finally, be flexible. Learn to roll with the punches. Be willing to accept that your storage medium will not be the standard forever, and be ready to adapt to what is coming next. Be wary, however, of the latest and greatest gadgets, as they soon might find themselves going the way of the 8-track.
For information about the League’s technology services, please e-mail Frank Hagy, chief information officer, or call him at (407) 835-3471, ext. 137. Click here for online information.
Jeremy Button is a technology services support specialist for the Florida League of Cities.
Reprinted from Quality Cities March/April 2004
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