On Tue, May 22, 2001 at 07:27:17AM -0700, Wolfgang Rupprecht wrote:

> 
> woods@weird.com (Greg A. Woods) writes:
> > 	http://news.excite.com/news/ap/010521/00/ibm-storage-breakthrough
> 
>    In the past decade, the data density for magnetic hard drives has
>    doubled every 18 months. Since 1997, it's been doubling every
>    year. Until the "pixie dust" coating breakthrough, scientists said
>    they faced a design barrier they thought would halt progress.
> 
> According to my resident magnetics expert, folks have always known how
> to make magnetically hard layers.  The missing piece has been making a
> head that can write on it.  (Current heads would saturate.)
> 
> If IBM also "discovered" how to make a head to go with this, I wonder
> why there isn't a press release about that.  That would be newsworthy.

What would be even more newsworthy, and geniuinely useful, would be backup
technology to go along with it.

Unfortunately, removable media is way, way behind the hard drives themselves.
So are the interfaces.

With my home systems (2, about 54GB total) there isn't a backup method
under $2000 (if not more) that can handle it easily, $700 or so for one
that would be OK. I just cross my fingers a lot, and backup the most
important stuff regularly, and the other stuff I either do slowly, or
not at all.

Right now 4GB 4mm is all I can afford and it's a struggle to just backup
my personal workstation.

Even if I got one of the $700 or so tape drives that does have the
capacity, the media prices are very high.

-- 
"I want this Perl software checked for viruses.  Use Norton
Antivirus." -- Charlie Kirkpatrick
______________________________________________________________________
Charles Shannon Hendrix      s h a n n o n @ w i d o m a k e r . c o m