Follow this link for info on a SATA HD RAID solution:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/...age/index.html

I was looking at the cost of DVCPro HD tape and SATA drives and came up with this comparison. Keep in mind that prices vary somewhat but this is a pretty good starting point:

DVCPro HD tapes
126 minutes: $80 = 64 cents/minute
64 minutes: $31 = 49 cents/minute
$25,000+ for deck!
Add backup costs.

250 GB drive: $120 = 48 cents/minute
No deck needed. Quick random access
Add backup costs.

If you get the right SATA hot swap system, sleds for the bare drives are about $20 each. Not bad.

Yikes. You say tomayto and I say tomahto. <g>

That said, (both ways!)... I have to come down on the side of the Death-to-Tape fanatics. We used DLT for a short while, around 8 years ago, on a PBS educational series. The read/write speed was abysmal, even by the standards of the day. The one time we needed a recovery, the tape fell apart.

Your mileage may vary.

Overlooked in most of this holy war is this basic fact:
Archiving? Pshaw!

~~Anything~~ we archive on is going to be largely obsolete in 5 years. That's hardly an "archival" time frame. It's stopgap.

It seems to me that one of the most important considerations is going competely overlooked: the speed at which 5 years of archived material will be able to be cloned over to the current available media storage solution in 2011.

I know this from my painstaking experience of transferring a zillion 100MB Zip drives to DVD-R using a USB Zip drive. How many of us have put off dubbing old <insert here: Hi-8, Beta SP, 3/4", whatever> tapes because the real-time dubbing process was just too awful to consider? (Author's note: my hand is raised. I still have ~~standard 8mm movies~~ to transfer!)

Fast and high capacity, good. Slow and cumbersome, bad. SATA-II drives do it for me. They're as fast as anything out there, somewhat reasonably priced, and might even have a little extra lifespan eked out by putting them in a different, future enclosure when eSATA becomes obsolete. The drives' read/write speed might be slow by 2011's standards, but at least you'd still be able to hook them up to your computer with minimal investment. And I'll take a "slow in 2011" 3Gb/sec transfer speed over DLT any day. Especially since the DLT's oxide will be flaking like lead paint in a tenement by the time you get around to copying it to newer media.