The handwriting is clearly on the wall. This has in part been a big part of my inspiration to start loading all these tapes to hard drive now. In order to handle this, we created a new loading station using a new system bought last year. We hooked up a MXO2 to a Beta SP VTR, and away it went. Tape after tape. To store all of this, we have also added a NAS box - thats Network Attached Storage. Its a Linux based box put together with dual AMD processors, 4 gigs of RAM and lots of space to add drives into. We've been capturing directly to the NAS storage using FCP and ProRes. This has all gone very well and without any problems.

We have really put shelves worth of tape onto a single drive that cost as much as two 90 minute Beta SP's used to. Now of course you're saying what if that drive wipes out ? the simple answer is to clone it to another drive and moved it to another physical location as backup. This is a very simple and cheap way of doing things. If you are really worried, make 2 backup copies.

If the next question is, aren't hard drives less then reliable ? The answer is they are more reliable then ever. The average drive's ( 5 year warranty units ) Mean Time Between Failures is now rated at 24/7 for 100 years ! Enterprise rated drives which are somewhat more expensive due to better construction are rated at 200 years.

While a power surge or other electrical failure could take a drive out, with clean UPS filtered power this factor drops significantly.
If the next argument is, what if I can't access the drive 10 years from now because the interface doesn't exist ( EIA vs IDE vs PATA ), you should plan to make copies every 5 years. With 5 year transfers, you'll see your storage expand by a factor of 4 to 6 times in capacity for the same money as today. Another words today a bare 1TB drive is around $100 or so, 5 years from now the same $100 will buy a 6TB drive or storage unit.

The time and cost to bring your assets from the old storage to the new storage will be quite minimal once you have them in a digital format. Their value could be as they say, priceless.