Electronic distribution has zoomed past CDs as the vehicle of choice for consumer music. DVDs see electronic distribution in their rear view mirror, coming on fast.
BluRay won a Pyrrhic victory when it defeated HD DVD for the DVD media crown. Within a few years, BluRay will join VHS tapes in the Home for Old-Fashioned Media.
But…there are still times when there’s just too many terabytes to send over even the fastest broadband. For those applications, disk drives are increasingly supplanting optical as the physical means to deliver the data.
Today’s portable disk drives fit in a shipping envelope, weigh less than half a pound and hold up to 500 gigabytes. Several businesses have built them into their business models:
- Frank Serafine, the composer/sound designer behind Star Trek , Tron and other movies, ships his sound effects collection to customers on a Seagate FreeAgent Go drive that replaces 40 DVDs.
- HDGiants (MusicGiants and VideoGiants) sells ultra-high definition digital music and movie collections that ship to customers on Seagate hard drives.
Why not just download the stuff?
- Broadband just isn’t fast enough for these volumes of much content to practically deliver the goods.
- The cost of the disk drive pales in comparison to the value of the data. A FreeAgent Go costs less than 3% of Serafine’s $2,495 product .
Our digital content is not only expanding in size. It’s cumulatively getting a lot more valuable.
How are you using hard drives to transport digital media? What would make it work better?
We’ve found that there are many situations where the bulk transportation of data makes more sense on disk then sending it over a WAN. This includes initial migration of storage into an off-site or replicated DR facility, moving data from one facility to another, and for transporting a given set of data to an edge presence.
Of course, you need to ensure that the data is protected against unauthorized disclosure, verify that it has not been corrupted, and audit that it all got there.
Thanks David. How do you typically do the bulk transport?
Three methods are typically used, depending on the customer deployment, timeframes and data volumes:
1. Shipping drives from a storage node (typically used for smaller migrations)
2. Shipping entire storage nodes, including attached storage shelves
3. Shipping tapes removed from an library
We’ve found that the second method is the most reliable and efficient procedure, but if the data volumes get large (100 TB+), the economics of tape compels you.