First, it depends on how much data you wish to archive and how "archival" you wish it to be. The advantage to the Zip is that the drive is cheap; the media is basically just a scaled up floppy. The cost of the drive relative to media starts to diminish after the first GB or two and is irrelevant after the first 10-20 GB. Thus, what you really want to know is: 1.) what is the most archival media 2.) what is the cheapest media (lowest $$/100MB) As such, zip should probably not be considered truly archival-that is if having available list mode data 3 years down the line is a life and death matter. For that matter, it is not that cheap either, once you start to accumulate Gig's of data. I don't know much about the Jaz, but my (uneducated) guess is that it is more or less a big Zip. Optical, by no means dead, are quite archival and have cheap media. The drives are more expensive than Zip and a bit more than Jaz. CD-R drives are still more expensive, but have the cheapest media. And, it appears lots of folks like 'em. ---------- From: Tom Mc Closkey Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 1997 5:13 PM To: cyto-inbox Subject: best long-term data storage??? We currently use an optical disk drive to store all our flow data. I understand that this drive is out of date now and we would like to get another method. I think the 3 choices are: 1] zip drive 2]jazz drive 3]writeable CD I would appreciate advice/opinions as to which is best for long term reliability, ease of access, cost, transport of data to another computer, etc. Or is there any other type of data storage that I'm overlooking? Thanks, Tom -------------------------------------------------------- Thomas W. Mc Closkey, Ph. D. Director, Flow Cytometry North Shore University Hospital Biomedical Research Center 350 Community Drive Manhasset, Long Island, New York 11030 ph: 516-562-4844 [office]; 516-562-1135/4641 [lab] 3/11/97 2:19:15 PM E-mail: thomasm@nshs.edu --------------------------------------------------------
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