On Jan 4, 2006, at 5:34 PM, Rob Studdert wrote:
Hardly practical for the amount of access I need/want from optical
media, but a neat looking device. Optical media is purely secondary
archive storage for me, though, so fitting things into protective
pages and then flipping through them on the rare occasion I need one
is good enough.
It's a relatively inexpensive library option for someone who hasn't
the
finances available to set up a distributed mass storage system or
multiple
external hard drives. Unfortunately the biggest down-side is that
it's only USB
1.1 and requires a host computer, if they made an NAS version even
I might
consider it.
I didn't realize it was USB 1.1. That's useless. A 5G DVD will take
two hours to transfer at USB 1.1 speeds.
A pair of external 60G hard drives with FireWire/USB 2.0 is a good
starting point for a backup/archive system and can be perfectly
satisfactory for a library of up to 10,000 or more image files,
depending upon what format you wish to archive. It will take up
little space and be far faster. Such a pair of drives can be had for
as little as $60 each in the US, less than the cost of one of these
optical media handling devices for both (never mind the cost of the
media itself and the burner device needed to store data on them).
A working pair of 250G archive drives hold my entire RAW and finished
images in PSD and JPEG formats from 2002 to the present. That's about
40,000 image files with 50G of free space yet to go. The drives cost
me [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The master archives which include all of the above plus all my other
image work moved to digital domain back to 1983 are on a pair of 400G
drives that cost me about $350 each. There's as yet about 90-100G of
free space on them. Most people don't need that large a storage
solution as yet. When I need something larger, it will cost less.
Godfrey
