Stewart said...Number one: seriously, am I the *only* person here who has
experienced a
massive catastrophic hard drive loss?  Trusting a music collection that has
undoubtedly cost me many thousands of dollars to the whims and vagaries of
a small hunk of metal does not strike me as a good idea.

I haven't had one yet (at home anyway). Disks are amazing little devices but
they are still a number of sheets of metal spinning at 5000RPM or
thereabouts with a bunch of tiny pieces of metal floating a couple of
microns above them. One touch of one head at this speed and the whole disk
fills up with metal dust and pretty much renders the disk useless.

And this is all happening in your pocket while you're out jogging or
whatever. I question whether ANY purely electronic media can be considered
archival. Like that commercial for Philips where the couple tosses the VCR
tape of their wedding out the window after putting it on a DVD disk. Hope
they don't drop it on the floor by accident and scratch it. And who knows
how long any given file type will be supported by new equipment? Eight
tracks and quadraphonic reel to reel anyone?

Luddite Ray