Could a diskmaker come in and make dst no big deal.
If I thought that might happen in the near future, I would
not be holding AXC. Assuming that the storage density of
tape and disk surfaces are comparable, think about the
surface areas involved. If you disassemble a disk drive,
you'll find a couple of platters, of which on each only
part of the top and bottom surfaces are used. There is
the problem of track circumference decreasing with the
radial position. In the early days, the sectors per
track was fixed, so only a band where the circumferences
did not differ extremely could be used. Now there are
disk drives which can handle variable sectors per track,
but it is a definite complication. Now think about pulling
all the tape out of a cassette, and how much surface area
that represents. Winchester type disk drives are sealed,
so with each group of platters you need a whole drive,
head, electronics, power supply, etc. Tapes are cheap
because you can have one drive and as many tapes as you
want. Jazz drives have changeable platters, but these
are expensive and can't reach the capacity of sealed
drives because they have to account for the possibility
of dust: meaning the heads are probably different and
can't be as close to the platter, which lowers the
recording density.
But technology has a way of sneaking up on you. In
1970, who would have predicted what we have today? |
