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Shuttle Columbia Flight Recorder Recovered In Texas
ctar writes "ABC News reports that the space shuttle Columbia's flight recorder has been found in Hemphill Texas. ABC says: "The finding today came after NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said investigators may never find a single definitive cause for the destruction of Columbia""
It was a found a week or so ago and its identity confirmed today.
Here More information than the press blurb in the article
I hope you die painfully and alone.
The recorder, sources told ABCNEWS, starts 10 minutes before Columbia's descent and measures the ship's temperature, aerodynamic pressure and other data. The information would not have been transmitted to NASA mission control during the flight.
Emphasis mine...
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
If you're backing up serious data, tape is the only viable solution.
The technology is old. Or rather, mature. Most, if not all of the bugs have been worked out years ago. At work we have some LTO drives. IIRC, they can be written to at 20 mbytes/second, and they hold 60 gbytes uncompressed (and 120 using the hardware compression. Granted, this assumes the data isn't compressed already. Realisticly, you can only get about 80-90 GB per tape.). You can engineer tapes to be increadibly resiliant to almost anything. The only moving part in DLT or LTO tapes is a spindle that can be turned by the drive. The spool is unwound into the drive itself, and rewound back into the tape cartridge. There are also 2 spool designs with the 'read area' in the middle like cassette tapes. There are also tapes in the 100/200gb range, and the speed and size keeps increasing linearly.
What other medium's are out there?
1) CDROM/DVDROM Slow to write, and not much data. Good shelf life (20-30 years) though. Usually CD's are used for 'archival' purposes. AKA "The IRS decrees that this data must be kept for the next 15 years."
2) Flash? it's solid state, and no moving parts, but the write speed SUCKS for real data sizes. Also, the density just isn't there. IIRC flash cards top out at 512 mb now.
3) Hard disk? WAY to fragile. We moved a batch of 20 or so servers with about 2 TB of disk this weekend. We lost 7 disks (of around 150).
At this point, untill someone comes up with a remarkably new idea, tape will be the king of long term, high density data storage for the forseable future.
Zapman