Comparison of Optical, Magnetic, and Paper Media
Penguin May 9th, 2008
This past week, I’ve been helping Ninja clean her mess called a room. Earlier in the week, I had been cleaning my own room and in both instances, I came across the same problem: What to do with old media?
The following is a list of media that I encountered:
- Optical (DVDs, CDs)
- Magnetic (3.5 inch, 5.25 inch, Zip, VHS)
- Paper (books, loose, photographs)
The main issue is density. Both in terms of physical space that the object takes up and the amount of data that can be stored on the medium. A secondary issue is obsolescence. The majority of these can no longer be read by modern hardware (floppies, Zip, VHS).
Optical Media
With bittorrent and about 1.5 TB of HDD, I find very little reason to maintain a collection of DVDs or CDs anymore. Of course, I have spindles of both containing various backups of video, images, mp3s, and software. But what to do with purchased optical media? It’s been at least 4 years since I’ve bought or even listened to a music CD. At the same time, I don’t feel like I should just toss it. I already have all but a few of the CDs in mp3.
Magnetic Media
Old magnetic media are garbage. The only ones I hesitated on throwing out were Zip disks and only because there was a possibility that Ninja had some art on it. I also have about 40 games or other pieces of software that come on CD but can’t be run by Windows XP because they were designed for DOS or Win95. Even though the media itself is current, the software has become obsolete. Do I go through the trouble of finding hacks and emulators to run them considering I haven’t touched many of these games in over 8 years?
Paper
The worst is paper. Paper has low physical and data density. 1 8.5×11 sheet can contain a max of 4872 characters (Courier New, 12pt, 0 margin) or 4.9 KB, that’s a data density of 0.05 KB/in^2. Where as a CD can hold 700 MB, resulting in a data density of 45,000 KB/in^2. That’s the equivalent of 900,000 pages.
The main benefit of paper is that it is future proof. No matter what technology comes around, we will always have the necessary bioware to read the media.
Conclusion
So, now what? As much as I would like to throw out my optical media, I can’t bring myself to do it. It takes up relatively little space compared to the other storage mediums. I’ve tossed pretty much all the magnetic media. And most of the paper has gone in the trash as well. Books are a little harder to throw away. Some old manuals have gone in the bin, but many others need to find their way to shelves.
-Penguin
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