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Build a Cheap Media-Reading PC?
tsm_sf writes "A recent Slashdot article got me thinking about dead and dying media. I'd like to build a cheap PC with the goal of being able to read as many old formats as possible. Size and power consumption would be design considerations; priority of media formats would be primary. How would you approach such a project?"
Get real. Do you think there are USB adapters for all those old tapedrives? Zipdrives? Floppy formats?
It's getting old hardware that'll challenge you.
It requires extensive scouting for parts that actually work, and obtaining them.
And when you get it and make sense of data, you would want to transfer it somewhere: you will end-up leapfrogging it trough couple of systems each decade apart from other unless you can interface everything with your target system (either not option or you would miss some hardware).
Definitely say good-bye to single, power efficient machine and say hi to couple of hard to maintain dinosaurs.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
a time machine
Tapedrives are usually SCSI and ZIP drives are SCSI, IDE or USB so with aUSB SCSI interface you should be able to handle them.
...is why do Ask Slashdot articles keep getting posted in other sections?
Look at his ID number.
USB was probably around all his life.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
A backup of my PC will only be about five million pages or so.
2 things...
1: Once you take out your operating system, applications, porn and downloaded music collection... How much real data do you actually have? I'd bet it'd fit on a handful of pages, particularly if you convert it to a standardised data format which might still be readable in 10,20 years.
2: An archive is not a backup. And a backup makes a poor archive. An archive is a copy of something you may want to read or access in 10 years, 100 years, 500 years. A backup is something you do to preserve your current working data set in case of failure.
HTH
Having said that. Even though paper has a proven n hundred year archival track record, I doubt it is a practical solution for digital data.
Deleted
We had such a thing at university, so that students and staff who had odd hardware could get data on to the network, and from there store it on something more common.
I'm assuming that around that time (when 3.5 inch floppies hadn't completely replaced 5.25) there were many proprietary formats in fairly common use. Amiga or Atari, perhaps.
Can't see why you'd want such a Frankenstein jobby one at home.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
He doesn't. If he was serious, he'd already know exactly what kinds of disc/tape/card/wax cylinders he wanted to read and Googled how to do it. The only reason the question was submitted was to make a provocative "Ask Slashdot" topic. Same as 90% of these, hardly a word in their backstory is true, and all the brain sweat and long detailed posts written to attempt to help the poster are wasted.