What can you do to store all your digital photographs? What is a cost-effective storage disk?

First mistake is to buy a Zip drive. Worse mistake is to buy a Jaz drive. Third mistake is to buy any other outdated technology, such as Apex MO disks from Pinnacle Micro. Even a poorer decision is to buy Direct Overwrite MO drives and disks (inexcusably overpriced and a dead-end technology that hardly any other company supports).

A Zip drive only olds a puny 100 MB. A good digital camera can take a single photo of 130 to 200 MB. The Better Light large format digital panorama camera (of which FLAAR Digital Imaging Techology Center has one) routinely takes a single digital photograph of 400 MB or more. So even a Jaz drive is not much help, because we take a minimum of 600 MB per day. Jazz disks are too expensive per unit of storage.

For the same reason avoid any MO systems at all, especially the 230 MB kind. Too small, don't hold enough.

Any old technology is a mistake because few if any companies will support these legacy systems. So avoid Apex from Pinnacle Micro and avoid all direct overwrite MO systems.

Today you can acquire the absolute latest technology, DVD-RAM, which will be available for years to come. DVD-RAM has already established itself worldwide as the leader in heavy-duty industrial strength digital storage. You can get DVD-RAM jukeboxes (from Cygnet, for example).

The FLAAR Photo Archive has hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of digital images. We burn them all onto CD-R disks (with an 8x burner from ProDirect) and for backup, copy each file onto a DVD-RAM disk. DVD-RAM is relatively fast; disks can be obtained anywhere in the world. Each disk holds a whopping 5.2 GB (2.6 GB per side).

The Digitial Imaging Technology Center and FLAAR Photo Archive buy all their DVD-RAM and CD-R burners (and all our hard drives, RAID systems and other storage) from a company which sells only digital storage. This means they know storage systems inside out.