I am observing that high capacity tapes continue to be expensive, while high capacity disk drives continue to fall in price at an astrounding rate. Non-tape writable media are also cheap and falling, though they tend to be lower capacity.
When some of these price/capacity curves cross, something has to change. Maybe it's just that the price premium on tapes follows the competition down, in a race to the marginal cost bottom. Maybe we stop buying tapes and (1) start feeding writable optical media into writers, or (2) tapes are replaced by black box cartridges which standardize interfaces and physical shape but not media. The standardized black box has long-term advantages over other media: no worries about alignment. no barriers to deploying new materials or other technological innovations. (It's why sealed "Winchester" disks wiped out removable disk drives.) It looks to me like the tape industry is falling behind its competitors, and unless something (like "O-Mass") causes a big improvements in both capacity and price/capacity, the reasons for buying tapes may disappear. If I'm buying my next archive medium in about 12 months, there's a good chance that my disposable "tapes" will be hot-plug FireWire drives and my drive will just be a FireWire hub. OR I'll buy a DVD writer (red or blue laser) with robotic feeder. One interesting question is where compression fits into this picture. An interesting variation would be a manufacturer producing a tape drive emulator whose sole functions are compression, serial interface to the random access device (throw in an AIT-like random access component), and physical interface to the cartridge. In any event, it would be a good idea for Amanda to be ready to support direct access devices as an output medium one of these days. (The changes won't be hard.) a prediction from: Liudvikas Bukys [EMAIL PROTECTED]