external solid state hard drive for long term storage

Optical media is simpler because it's just a matter of pointing a laser and light sensor at the grooves and spinning the disc. What will last are physical negatives and physical prints (with the exception of inkjet prints which are more easily damaged).įloppy disks are still readable and they haven't been in use for about 20 years. The Library of Congress does not consider any digital medium as suitable for archival purposes for this reason. Same with floppy discs and many current computers ship with a DVD reader. All the tape formats from the 60's, 70's, and 80's have died and good luck trying to find a reader. A safety deposit box is the perfect place for such drives.Ī big problem with digital storage media is the short life expectancy of the data readers. Verbatim’s BD-R 6x and BD-R DL discs use a newly developed inorganic recording layer called MABL, this patented technology ensures superb quality recording, long archival lifetime and excellent “playback” performance.'īest is a hard drive stored in a metal container to avoid problems with magnetic fields.Based on my research the M-Discs should last a century and the standard Blu-Ray discs should last decades and may even last just as long as the M-dscsīut cheap LTH (low to high) dye based Blu-Rays should never be used for archiving data, or ANYTHING for that matter because they're garbageĮdit: Here's an advertising document from Verbatim. I've also been using Blu-Ray standard MABL (metal ablative) discs and also M-Discs. You buy a 16 GB thumb drive and wonder, why is this already full. The sad part, for those of us who remember 20 MB external hard drives, is that even 25 GB seems so small these days. Actually, I've gone back and invested in the M-Disc optical disk technology.

External solid state hard drive for long term storage