I am in a corporate setting and looking for ways to address this issue
with very little staff.  I know that traditional wisdom is to store
records on removable media, but there aren’t any media choices with a
long life AND easy (read: cheap, immediate) accessibility.
Preservation and access are staff intensive.  This becomes even more of
an issue as the volume of records stored increases.

I am curious as to what role hard disk is playing in records stores in
most companies. My gut is telling me now that hard disk - even when it
is expensive SAN and NAS - may be the best storage medium for long term
records retention.  The life of magnetic disk, at three to four years,
is somewhat shorter that DVD and CD but the media migration costs
should be way lower, too - it's much easier to migrate a terabyte of
content from one hard disk to another than it is to migrate the same
content stored on hundreds of DVDs. Over a twenty year period, with
hard disk you might do a migration every four years (5 migrations) as
opposed every ten years (or less) on DVD, but you'll still have to
mount all those DVDs every year or two to make sure they haven't
degraded and will still load.  So monitoring media stability is
easier/cheaper on hard disk, access is easier and faster, creating
preservation copies (aka backing up) is easier.  

Has anyone does an analysis of this alternative from a cost of
preservation perspective?  Any thoughts?

Mary Lynne Nelson
The MITRE Corporation
McLean, VA
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