<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 8:16 AM, Brian Wood <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:beww@beww.org">beww@beww.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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</div>And most people don't have SCSI any more.<br>
<br>
Datacenter type commercial gear often becomes available cheaply after a while, but that doesn't mean it's a good choice<br>
for a home user.<br>
<br>
I paid something like $25 each for my DLT drives, if I hadn't had a source for media, and already had SCSI controllers, it<br>
would have made no sense at all.</blockquote><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>heh... "most" people never HAD SCSI. :) For backup/archive, there just isn't a good home user option. HDD arrays aren't really the best choice for various reasons, but tapes just cost too much and DVD/CD just aren't reliable enough and don't have the capacity. Even BD doesn't have the capacity, IMO, media cost is high, but will come down over time, and reliability is a huge unknown. The "rapid aging" tests they use to claim 100 years of data retention have been shown to be worthless, so that leaves non-datacenters like 99% of us in the cold. If I could find a decent cost for the media and drives, I'd consider tape. I have SCSI controllers around that would work fine. But the cost is just way too high. For me, it was cheaper to use the old HDDs and misc parts to build another ZFS server and put that in a friend's house for remote backup. And with ZFS I can do automated checks to make sure the data is good. Tapes and plastic discs can't do that unless you own a changer robot ($$$$$$). </div>
<div><br></div><div>For friends and family asking to borrow a show, I think I'm going to start telling them to buy a Popcorn type box and a USB HDD. Faster for me, no transcoding to fit the media, and no compatibility issues. Still not ideal, but nothing really is I suppose. :) </div>
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