There are two main academic conferences devoted specifically to mass storage (in addition to, of course, the supercomputer and OS conferences, and interesting stuff in databases, optical conferences, Usenix, SOSP...).
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the IEEE run two conferences, in an 18-month or so alternating pattern.
You'll find my notes on the letest Goddard conference at
www.isi.edu/~rdv/conferences/goddard96.html.
The contact for the NASA Mass Storage Conference (Sept. 17-19, 1996):
Jorge Scientific Corporation 7500 Greenway Center Drive Suite 1130 Greenbelt, MD USA 20770 tel(301)220-1701 fax(301)220-1704
or if that fails email bkobler@gsfcmail.nasa.gov or
ben.kobler@gsfc.nasa.gov. There is some info available on the web at
esdis.gsfc.nasa.gov.
Also, the latest IEEE was in September '95:
* The 14th IEEE Mass Storage Symposium was September 11-14, 1995 at Monterey, CA. More info from Bernie O'Lear (olear@ncar.ucar.edu) or Sam Coleman (scoleman@llnl.gov).
Also of interest, there are the conferences on Very Large Database Systems. I have a reference somewhere...
Interesting material shows up in the SPIE conferences.
I would like to bring to your attention the THIC Home Page at the URL
www.thic.org and its anonymous ftp archives at the URL
ftp://ftp.uu.net/vendor/THIC/
THIC started out in the early 70's as the Tape Head Interface Committee under the auspices of the DoD, but has since grown and expanded to embrace most data recording technologies. THIC has been meeting four times a year, alternating between the east and west coasts. The last meeting was in Seattle WA on Jan 21 and 22, 1997, and the next will be on April 22 and 23 at the DoubleTree in Tysons Corner VA. The papers range from marketing, new product announcement and discussion, to the problems of the various recording technologies. Since October 1995, I have been trying to collect as many of the papers as I could from each of the meetings and have been placing them in Adobe PDF on the THIC archives at ftp.uu.net. I also maintain a no-frills home page where the agenda is displayed, with links to papers which are available in the archives. (P.C. Hariharan, 97/2)
email me at rdv@isi.edu
Copyright 1996 Rod Van Meter