To date, Flash Memory has not been considered to be "archival" by any
means. In fact, within the telecom industry it has already been proven to
be, uh, less than stable. I understand and agree with what Wayne is saying,
but in actual practice we're experiencing failures. From what I'm hearing
from my cohorts on the supply side--it is looking like about 5% of 36 months
of in-service devices are experiencing corrupted memory. Inotherwords, one
out of every 20 boxes is getting random failures pointing directly to
corrupted flash memory withing three years. This 5% failure rate definitely
coincides with our own experiences. What really gets one sweating is when
you have a device that needs rebooting and it doesn't come back online
because the programming and configuration, which is stored on flash memory
is corrupted. Trust me, it happens more often than anybody wants to admit.
That's why, in our own company, we have a pretty tough procedure to follow
before we ever cycle a box.
Archiving of images is a HUGE issue within the forensic and scientific
communities. The solution which is emerging as the gold standard? Film.
Police departments around the world have been migrating towards film
backup. They shoot digital, print digitally, but either use a
digital-to-film device or are photographing in a copy stand the digital
prints onto 35mm film.
AG
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