What specifications are available for digital preservation and processing workstations?

Question

Is there a place where specifications are available for workstations used in digital processing and digital preservation activities, such as disk imaging or format validation?

Answer 1

The BitCurator recommended workstation (http://www.bitcurator.net/2013/08/02/building-a-digital-curation-workstation-with-bitcurator-update/) is a good start.  Barring any specific needs (e.g., you'll want to use Windows for migrating certain media formats, or OSX/*nix for heavy scripting/processing), most reasonable modern off-the-shelf systems should suffice.

The only real caveat is that you'll likely need more RAM than you expect - tools like OpenRefine and web crawlers can consume tremendous amounts of RAM, and virtual machines can use a fair bit as well.

Regarding media migration hardware, this should be dictated by your collection needs.  If you don't have many floppy disks, you probably won't need fancy hardware; if you have a lot of CDs or Zip disks, allocate hardware accordingly.

Comments

We do get a lot of tapes and hard drives and CDs/DVDs.

Answer 2

One good place to start in looking for them is the File Formats Wiki (fileformats.archiveteam.org), which has pages on all sorts of formats (phyisical or electronic), with links to specs and other information. It's also a wiki so that you can register an account there and add any information you find elsewhere to make the site even better.

Comments

I think the question is asking about physical specs for comptuers, ie processors, memory, disk etc, rather than format specs.

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Yes, that is what I was asking. I am looking for specifications - memory, numbers of processors, drive capacity, video cards, etc - for workstations.