NEW APPROACH TO OPTICAL STORAGE MODELING, PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS, AND EVALUATION

A new approach to modeling and evaluating storage media for archival purposes is presented. Different models are presented with varying document storage requirements ranging from 25,000 to 1 million per day. This evaluation process can be very useful for a variety of industrial applications where very large amounts of storage over the years is required. A media selection methodology is given to assist users in the evaluating process. The optical disk is a stable, reliable, high-capacity, high-performance, and very cost-effective storage media for data storage and archival applications. The disk provides very high data storage capacity for a low cost per megabyte compared to other on-line storage devices. Optical disk-based storage technology is recommended for archival storage for various applications in the data and image processing area, such as engineering, manufacturing, document management, banking, insurance, and health care. We evaluate different storage media for long-term archival of large amounts of data and the cost-effectiveness of different storage media for various models based on document storage requirements.