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
bukys AT cs.rochester DOT edu