Which one is better for general storage? Considering you can find 32 GB flash drives now a days. I can see optical media slowly fading away in the future. Aside from the the lack of a usb port for playing music in my car, are their any disadvantages to using SSD? That and the fact that most computers don't support booting from USBs (i think). CDs can break, scratch, were only "compact" till tiny flash drives and cards showed up. The only other plus I can think of is price/byte. But IMO that's overpawered by flash's close to unlimited re-writability.

plz comment

SSD costs more. For backup purposes, I'd say optical media has the advantage, if stored carefully. Tape drives are still widely used today, so assuming the capacity goes up and price goes down, optical media might just be the new back up solution.

I think RAM drives are going to overtake both media types once it becomes perfected and more economically feasible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

This but on a bigger scale.

They just need to figure out a way to prevent data loss from turning the PC off.

Optical Media FTW!
It's cheap, can store upto 4.7Gb of data and can be managed and stored for longer periods of time (if done properly) and they are universal.


Flash on the other hand is good for portable media not for backup purposes.

flash is best for data transfer.

optical media is best for data storage.

well, not best...but better than flash

Optical media is fading out. I was at the walmart in my old town the other day (not on my own accord, my co-workers needed to do some shopping and I was getting a ride) and saw something called "slot music."

It was micro SD cards with songs preloaded on them, Im unsure of the DRM on the songs but im sure its breakable (if all else fails the analog hole is eternal)

This is basically it. Tape drives are still best for archival purposes, but I believe there's still some improvements to be made with the newest (azo-metal) dyes used in optical media to make it more suitable for extended storage.

The larger issue is that many manufacturers can manipulate parameters that have a very significant impact on archival life such as the type of dye, reflective layer or polycarbonate used to reduce price or control quality. In my opinion Verbatim is the exception since they control the entire supply chain via Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings.

When I was working on a case study a couple years back, the "state of the art" as far as archival testing was still not quite up to par. NIST is still developing more efficient test methods so I think we'll see a lot more optical media in these applications in the next few years.

I believe I've read test reports that some optical media may fail after only ten years of storage.
IIRC discs using blue dye lasted the longest.
And tape would seem more apt to succumb to oxygen degradation, just as old rubber dry rots.
Is there any storage media now that will hold the information for 100 years?

Stone tablets. Someone will eventually make a CNC machine capable of writing/reading them.

durrrrr - External hard drives anyone? Best cost per GB, will last long properly stored...