Assume you can choose among magnetic tapes, magnetic hard disks, recordable optical discs (CD-R: write once, read many), and flash memory USB drives. Consider each scenario independently of the others. For each of the following purposes, explain which one of the media you would choose and why. Start by saying which medium you have chosen. Then explain why.

a. You need to store thousands of employee records for several years. This is only a backup procedure. The information will never be processed from the backup medium.

b. The storage medium is used as part of an airline reservation system.

c. Your business sells machines that must be maintained well by your clients. You wish to provide them with a digital version of the maintenance manual. The manual includes an index (like the one at the end of a book) with links to the proper pages.

d. You are a sales manager who travels often. You must store a large PowerPoint presentation that you show to prospective customers in their office. You do not carry a laptop computer, but there is a PC wherever you go. You do not want to carry CDs, because you found that the graphic-rich presentation moves too slowly from CDs.

e. You have a business on the web. You maintain your own server and site. You provide much textual and graphical information from the site. Customers can search products and make purchases.

f. You want to store all the paintings of impressionist painters for use by your local library patrons. Patrons can search by artist name, artist nationality, or the paintings topic. The library would like multiple copies of what you store, and to be able to loan them to patrons for viewing at home.

g. You use the medium for a large database that your employees manipulate frequently.

h. You work for the IRS, and you need to archive the tax records of millions of taxpayers for several years. The archiving is done after all processing of tax filings are complete and after all refunds and payments have been made. IRS employees must occasionally go back and retrieve specific records from these files, and when they need a record, they want to access it directly.