Ron

The 'negligible' cost of the storage media does not mean anything. The "old fashioned storage" media known as a sheet of paper costs a quite negligible less than $0.01, but we all should know that it costs many many times that to service that sheet of paper over its lifetime.

23 Terabytes a day is a very large number of DVDs - thats over 5000 DVDs (by my rough calculation). No one in their right mind would want to store stuff on that many DVDs when there are far more efficient storage devices available.

John Lovejoy
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My own views, no one elses - definitely not the views of my employer

-----Original Message-----
From: Ronald W. Frazier [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, December 10, 2006 3:15 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [RM] hundreds of links on digital preservation


<snip>
They ingest enormous quantities of data.  I 
saw a chart which estimated their average cost of maintaining the system 
and administration over 5 years to be close to 9 EUROS PER GIGABYTE!  That 
translates to $12.12 at the current exchange rate.  This is an astounding 
cost.  This means the cost of archiving the data from a standard DVD movie, 
4.7 GB, for 5 years, would be 42.3 Euros or $56.97 at the current exchange 
rate!  It would be cheaper to just buy a couple of movies from the 
publisher every 5 years.  Of course, with most digital data, you don't have 
that luxury.  Anyway, this cost factor really surprised me, considering the 
almost negligible cost of the storage media itself.  I also saw a proposal 
for a data storage system for audio visual materials for an agency 
affiliated with the US National Archives which is planning to ingest, get 
this, 23 TERABYTES PER DAY!  That's 23,000 GB / day.  <snip>

Ron

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