Jamie Lean 'We'll Need a Bigger Hard Drive!'
Channel: Archives New Zealand
Date: 2012-04-18

As we accelerate into the 21st century the amount of data being stored and managed by archives is sky rocketing. The first to feel the full weight of this burden are the audio visual archives where a single film title in High Definition may take up to 7 terrabytes of storage. At the same time the effects of Moore's Law are slowing down meaning that capacity isn't expanding to cope and the cost is no longer halving every 18 months. Add to that concerns over the shelf life of digital files, debates over hard drives versus data tape as long term storage and the commercial imperative for developers to produce new and better file systems (and forcing old codecs into redundancy) and the future seems less than clear. I will cover these issues and more from the perspective of the film archiving world.