One of my external hard drives is about to die. It’s about eight years old. All of a sudden it made a high pitched whining screeching sound and I got the beachball of death in OS X for a minute or so. I recently set up a RAID 1 array of two 500G drives just for this reason, but it’s a good reminder of the unreliability of this media, and the first thing I thought of is that I have to get to those 50 mini DV tapes I have sitting in a drawer. They do not, apparently, have a long shelf life.